, and color other than the black and grayscale in which this book is printed. Rich text often conforms to the Rich Text Formatting (RTF) standard developed by Microsoft Corporation. RTF allows a word processing program to create a rich text file encoded with all necessary formatting instructions, and without any hidden codes. An RTF-encoded file also can be transmitted between applications on a computer and across a network without loss of formatting because it consists only of standard text characters. See also plain text.