How to open .RTX files on Windows
To open .RTX files on Windows, right-click the .rtx file → Open with → choose WordPad (commonly supports Rich Text documents), or choose another editor/word processor you trust.
Step-by-step instructions
- Right-click the .rtx file → Open with → choose WordPad (commonly supports Rich Text documents), or choose another editor/word processor you trust.
- If it opens as garbled text or won’t open, try opening it in a plain-text editor to confirm it is a text/richtext file (and not a different format renamed to .rtx).
- If you need better formatting compatibility, open it in an alternative word processor and re-save/export to a more widely used format.
Common issues
The .RTX file won’t open or opens in the wrong app
Your system may not have an app associated with text/richtext, or the file association may be incorrect.
- Use “Open with” and manually choose a compatible editor/viewer (commonly WordPad on Windows or TextEdit on macOS).
- If Linux doesn’t recognize it properly, check your desktop’s MIME associations (the shared-mime-info database maps *.rtx to text/richtext).
Formatting looks different than expected
Different programs may interpret rich text markup differently, so styling and layout may not match across apps.
- Try opening the file in another compatible editor/word processor and compare results.
- If you need consistent sharing, open it in a desktop app and re-save/export to a format your recipients commonly use.
The file contains unreadable characters or looks like the wrong format
The file may be corrupted, incomplete, or not actually a Rich Text (text/richtext) document despite the .rtx extension.
- Open it in a plain-text editor to see whether it contains readable rich text content.
- Re-download or ask the sender for the file again if it appears truncated or corrupted.
Security note
.RTX (text/richtext) is a text-based format, but you should still treat files from unknown sources cautiously: a maliciously crafted text file can sometimes exploit bugs in a viewer/editor’s parser.