If you use a non-Latin alphabet, Microsoft Word’s RTF output is a horrific mess of encoding switches everywhere that makes manual text extraction pretty much un

If you use a non-Latin alphabet, Microsoft Word’s RTF output is a horrific mess of encoding switches everywhere that makes manual text extraction pretty much untenable (and while RTF can use both UCS-2 and Windows codepages, Word seems to stick to—potentially multiple—codepages if it can, presumably for compatibility). That said, Microsoft always intended RTF to be Word’s exchange and archival format (unlike DOC, which was a mess they did not want to document), so it has enough of an official spec that extracting text, at least, is very possible.