Oh, I’ve definitely edited RTF manually, when I wanted fine control, or to strip out certain formatting but not all. But it’s definitely not intended for manual editing; and it’s hopeless if you want to go beyond ASCII, as you can’t (from memory) just use UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding, you need to escape non-codepage characters as \uNUMBER?, where NUMBER is the signed decimal representation of a UTF-16 code unit, which is probably the most absurd escape representation I’ve ever encountered. (The character after the number, here and normally ? these many years, represents the fallback character to use if Unicode is not supported. \uc0 can disable that so it’d be just \uNUMBER. It’s cases like that that really show how RTF was designed as an internal file format for things like Word, back before they fully supported Unicode. RTF has not aged very well as a file format.)