I always thought the only common real-world use of RTF was as a clipboard format (rather than a file format), so you could copy and paste with bold and italics.

But then at some point I think that might have been replaced in practice with HTML as a clipboard format instead.

I'm not sure if you copy text from browsers or word processors today, if it's usually available as both RTF and HTML, or only one?

TextEdit on macos use rtf by default

Scrivener saves everything in RTF files.

It’s used a lot in the localization industry.

I’m curious, why is that? When you’re dealing with semi-structured data like localization files, adding formatting seems counter-productive.

how so? if a word is bold in a sentence, you want it to be bold in the translation without having to split the sentence up (which will fail as soon as there is more than one formatted word)

I see. I’ve seen embedded styling/html in localized text, but doing that with rtf also makes sense.

I haven't created an installer for a Windows desktop app in over 5 years, but it was a common format for the embedded EULA. It's not as important these days, but there was a huge file size difference between an RTF created in Wordpad vs Word.

The macOS installer app uses rtf/rtfd as its EULA/readme format as well.

In fact rtf usage is all over the place on Apple platforms. Cocoa/AppKit apps can take an rtf file to present in the app’s standard About window for credits/acknowledgments and if you want to present rich text with low hassle and resource consumption, by far the easiest way is to embed an NSTextView/UITextView with editing disabled which can then have a bundled rtf loaded into it trivially (just a couple lines of code).

A WebKit webview and HTML could be used instead in these instances, but that’s significantly more heavy and doesn’t have an OS-included WYSIWYG editor which makes it less friendly to e.g. non-technical team members whose job it might be to prepare the content being displayed.

And you can open and read the license without having to get a Microsoft Office license first. I always figured that's the reason

Back in the day I worked on a desktop shell for senior accessibilty in .net (pointerware) & was tasked with creating a word processor. Went with richtextedit control to do most the heavy lifting, & included being able to forward rtf via email which would convert subset of rtf editor exposed to html

Some health systems still do, but that is thankfully being phased out with the growing adoption of FHIR and / or HL7.