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When I open rich-text files created in OS X's/macOS's TextEdit on Windows in WordPad or Microsoft Word, neither bulleted/unordered lists' nor numbered/lettered/ordered lists' formatting transfer over as having been read correctly. (To be more specific, this happens at least in documents where your ordered list items' delimiters have custom suffixed punctuation.) Furthermore, any attempt to add new items to such lists from within either of the latter two programs mangles their containing file's list formatting. In both cases, the result is that lists' bullets, numbers, and letters start out with proper indentation in TextEdit, then end up left-justified after going through a Windows text editor like those listed while the list item text they denote retains its earlier, correct horizontal alignment.

Are there any Windows RTF editors, preferably free to download, that don't cause this problem?

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  • I guess you have already considered using LibreOffice. You could indicate why/how it doesn't fulfill your needs.
    – Damien
    Commented Apr 11, 2021 at 20:02
  • (Facepalms.) Now why didn't I think of that?! Guess I'll have to try that and report back. (I mean, I usually like to pick one thing in a software category and stick with it, but, eh, it's worth the shot.)
    – RandomDSdevel
    Commented Apr 12, 2021 at 2:00
  • LibreOffice doesn't open TextEdit RTF files with lists in them properly. I also tried OpenOffice, and that doesn't work quite right, either, unfortunately.
    – RandomDSdevel
    Commented Apr 12, 2021 at 22:13
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    Surprising. It might be an encoding problem. Did you check the format used in TextEdit? UTF8?
    – Damien
    Commented Apr 13, 2021 at 9:50
  • Yeah, it is. Odds are that TextEdit RTF documents might use a custom way of encoding lists in saved files, hence this question.
    – RandomDSdevel
    Commented Apr 13, 2021 at 14:42

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  1. FreeOffice TextMaker supports read/write of rtf, doc, docx. Sometime they played with limitation to docx saving. Version of 2016 works fine and very fast, new versions works too. Just try, it is not free, it is limited freeware.

  2. LibreOffice/OpenOffice Writer is too big weight for your tasks, I agree. It is mainly for docx (2007-2013+), doc (97-2003+) and odt (odf).

  3. MS WordPad had become too buggy with rtf after 8-10 Windows changes games. Btw, RTF abandoned in 2008.

  4. AbiWord is good, but it has some bugs.

  5. WPS Office (KingSoft Office) is by speed between MS Office and FreeOffice. Supports rtf, dox and docx too.

  6. You can see small comparison here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_word_processors#Import_or_open_capabilities . The answer is not based on that wiki, but maybe it helps you.

Personally I prefer doc and docx format, which are more portable and supported.

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