Is the Rich Text Format deprecated?

Question

From the Wikipedia page on Rich Text Format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format):

As of March 2008, the current version is 1.9.1. According to Microsoft's Office 2010 resource kit documentation, Microsoft is discontinuing enhancements to the RTF specification. Further, some new features in Word 2010 and later versions will not save properly to the RTF format.[11]

The reference is to here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179199.aspx#BKMK_Changed

I'm working on including some static, formatted text which will be pulled from a local database and will be displayed by an app that is only being used internally.

Should I use the Rich Text Format via .NET's built-in RichTextBox? Will it be deprecated in the near future for Microsoft's new OpenXML format?

Would it be better to skip Rich Text altogether and go with HTML formatting? If so, what .NET control would you recommend?

Obviously I don't want to design my own text formatting control for such a trivial problem, but I don't want to waste development time implementing a nearly deprecated technology.

Thanks!

Gefen

The text there says, that RTF is not abandoned, but only not further developed. That's a difference. – Menis

Answer 1

You're going to be fine for a long long time with the RTF control. It's not going anywhere. There may be better alternatives in the future, but the RTF control won't get deprecated. As Boldewyn said in the comment, enhancements aren't being made to RTF to keep it up to date with the features in Microsoft Word. But the RTF format itself is isn't going anywhere.

Liederkranz

Yep, RTF will be around forever but stuck in its present incarnation. There's already a ton of settings in Word that cannot be saved in RTF (content controls, themes, etc) and so it has already been left behind. – Henley