RTF files and Word v WordPad

[Andrew Truckle]

Hi

Up until now I have always used WordPad for RTF files because it seemed that using  Word RTF files often caused display problems.

WordPad is no longer shipped with Windows 11. So has the RTF viewer been improved with the various recent releases so that it will support RTF files saved with Word?

Thanks.

Andrew

[Martijn Laan]

There isn't really a RTF viewer built in. It uses Microsoft's Rich Edit control which is part of all versions of Windows and it supports all versions of that control.

AFAIK WordPad was just a wrapper around this control as well.

Greetings,

Martijn

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[Andrew Truckle]

I wonder if it is worth rolling a simple RTF container then in Inno as a helper tool to manage RTF files? Else we will all start having problems won't we?

Andrew

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[Jernej Simončič]

On Monday, October 6, 2025, 09:39:17, Andrew Truckle wrote:

I wonder if it is worth rolling a simple RTF container then in Inno as a helper tool to manage RTF files? Else we will all start having problems won't we?

Windows RTF control shouldn't have any problems displaying Word's RTF files, as long as you don't use any features that it doesn't support; the nice thing about WordPad was that it showed you the files exactly as they're rendered by the RTF control, and also that the saved files were somewhat smaller than RTF files produced by Word.

 

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[Bill Stewart]

On Sunday, October 5, 2025 at 8:48:08 AM UTC-6 Andrew Truckle wrote:

WordPad is no longer shipped with Windows 11.

My response to this nuisance was to build a VM with the last version of Windows 11 that had WordPad (I believe 23H2) and get the following files:

%ProgramFiles%\Windows NT\Accessories\<language>\wordpad.exe.mui

%ProgramFiles%\Windows NT\Accessories\wordpad.exe

%ProgramFiles%\Windows NT\Accessories\WordpadFilter.dll

I copied these files to the same paths on my updated Windows 11 machine and created a shortcut to it. Works well for me.

[Andrew Truckle]

I found this YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZKNvP3HQds

It includes a download link to the 3 files for English. So I downloaded them from there.

But, I still think that maybe it is advantageous to include these files into Inno since it is much better for the management of RTF content IMHO. Either way, I am now back up and running.

[Gavin Lambert]

On Sunday, October 12, 2025 at 11:50:12 PM UTC+13 Andrew Truckle wrote:

But, I still think that maybe it is advantageous to include these files into Inno since it is much better for the management of RTF content IMHO. Either way, I am now back up and running.

It would unfortunately not be legal to bundle Wordpad with Inno, since that's a Microsoft proprietary app.

It would theoretically be feasible to incorporate a separate RTF editor control (based around the standard rich edit control) into the IDE but I'm not sure how much effort would be needed to add this feature.

Personally, I only use RTF for very light styling (bullet points and colours/bold/italics), so I usually just generate the RTF programmatically directly in [Code].  (Though admittedly based on an initial template created in Wordpad.)

[Jernej Simončič]

On Monday, October 13, 2025, 00:40:23, Gavin Lambert wrote:

It would theoretically be feasible to incorporate a separate RTF editor control (based around the standard rich edit control) into the IDE but I'm not sure how much effort would be needed to add this feature.

IIRC, Delphi used to ship with a sample editor application that was built with the RichEdit control, so maybe just package that?

 

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< Jernej Simončič ><><><><>< https://eternallybored.org/ >

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