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

  1. Right-click the .rtx file → Open with → choose WordPad (commonly supports Rich Text documents), or choose another editor/word processor you trust.
  2. 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).
  3. 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.

  1. Use “Open with” and manually choose a compatible editor/viewer (commonly WordPad on Windows or TextEdit on macOS).
  2. 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.

  1. Try opening the file in another compatible editor/word processor and compare results.
  2. 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.

  1. Open it in a plain-text editor to see whether it contains readable rich text content.
  2. 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.

Back to .RTX extension page