RTF is normally limited to applying formatting to
7-bit ASCII text, though it is possible to produce other characters in Arabic or Cyrillic through the use of special codes.
For SMS testing, the expanded capability includes support for Unicode and Binary text formats, in addition to the
7-bit ASCII format.
The
7-bit ASCII encoding encompasses 128 characters, the Latin alphabet (lower and upper case), numbers, punctuation, some symbols.
Other computer sort sequences, such as the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (
7-bit ASCII) (ANSI X3.4), do not produce userfriendly indexes, bibliographies, or library catalogs, because they sort uppercase and lowercase letters separately and sort punctuation marks and symbols in various places between numerals and letters.
The secret to accomplishing this was to convert 8-bit binary files to
7-bit ASCII files before posting them to News for transmission.