Produce a Rich Text Format (RTF) file from your documentation project using the HelpNDoc help authoring tool

Even though the Microsoft Rich Text Format (RTF) could be considered as a legacy document format, it is supported by enough software and operating systems to be considered as highly portable and a great choice for cross-platform document exchange. Thanks to the HelpNDoc help authoring tool, you can produce your documentation projects not only as Microsoft Word DocX documents, but also as fully valid RTF documents, giving you a great choice of document format generation options. Let’s see how easy it is to produce RTF documents using HelpNDoc.

Create a new build

HelpNDoc’s build system lets you produce an unlimited number of versions of your documentation projects in all supported formats. Let’s create a new build to produce a RTF document.

From HelpNDoc’s Home ribbon tab, click the top part of the Generate help button to access the “Generate documentation” window. This is where all your project’s builds are managed.
We can now create a new build to produce a RTF document out of the currently opened documentation project:

• From the “Build list” panel, click the Add button to show the documentation selector popup menu
• Click Word documentation: a new build named “Build word documentation” is added to the list

Make sure that the “Build word documentation” build is selected and enabled in the “Build list”, so that we can update its settings.

Generate RTF documents

By default, the “Word documentation” build type will generate a Microsoft Word DocX document. We simply need to change some settings to make it generate a RTF document instead.

First of all, make sure that the “Output file” path ends with the .rtf file extension instead of .docx to make sure that the produced RTF file is correctly viewed when deployed.

We then need to access the template settings tab for this build: from the “Build settings” panel, if the “Template settings” tab is not visible, click the Customize link to show it.

Once the “Template settings” tab is visible, simply check the “Generate RTF format” checkbox and voilà: HelpNDoc can now produce a RTF version of your documentation project! Click the Generate button to test it and see HelpNDoc do the hard work for you.

Conclusion

Once you’ve written your documentation using the HelpNDoc help authoring tool, you can generate multiple documentation formats out of it to make sure that you effortlessly reach your target audience. HelpNDoc can generate CHM help files, fully responsive HTML web-site, DocX and PDF documents, ePub and Kindle eBooks, Qt help files as well as Markdown documents. As we’ve seen in this article, it can also generate portable RTF documents without additional efforts. And the best part is that HelpNDoc is completely free for personal use and evaluation purposes: download your copy now to test it for yourself!

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