Plugin.RTFView 1.0.0

Plugin.RTFView

A cross-platform .NET MAUI control that renders Rich Text Format (RTF) content. It maps onto each platform's native text rendering, so RTF looks the way the platform intends:

Install

dotnet add package Plugin.RTFView

Targets net10.0-android, net10.0-ios, net10.0-maccatalyst, and net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0.

Setup

Register the handler in MauiProgram.cs:

using Plugin.RTFView;

public static MauiApp CreateMauiApp()
{
    var builder = MauiApp.CreateBuilder();
    builder
        .UseMauiApp<App>()
        .UseRtfView();   // 👈 registers the RtfView handler

    return builder.Build();
}

Usage

XAML

<ContentPage xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/dotnet/2021/maui"
             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml"
             xmlns:rtf="clr-namespace:Plugin.RTFView;assembly=Plugin.RTFView"
             x:Class="MyApp.MainPage">

    <rtf:RtfView RtfSource="{Binding Document}" />

</ContentPage>

C#

using Plugin.RTFView;

var view = new RtfView
{
    RtfSource = @"{\rtf1\ansi {\colortbl;\red200\green0\blue0;}" +
                @"\b\fs28\cf1 Hello\b0  \i world\i0 !\par}"
};

API

Setting RtfSource to null or an empty string clears the view. Malformed RTF is handled gracefully — the control logs a diagnostic and clears rather than throwing.

Supported RTF features

The native platforms (iOS/Mac/Windows) support the full breadth of their respective RTF engines. The Android parser is a pragmatic, dependency-free subset covering the common cases:

• Groups { } with inherited state
• Bold, italic, and underline (\b \i \ul + their 0 / none forms, \plain)
• Foreground colour (\colortbl + \cf)
• Background / highlight colour (\cb, \highlight)
• Font family (\fonttbl + \f)
• Font size (\fs, half-points → density-independent pixels)
• Paragraph alignment (\ql \qc \qr \qj, \pard)
• Paragraph and line breaks (\par, \line), tabs (\tab)
• Escaped characters (\\ \{ \}), \'xx hex bytes, and \uN Unicode with \ucN fallback skipping

Not supported on Android

These do not map cleanly onto a TextView / Spanned model and degrade to plain (unstyled / unaligned) text:

• Lists, tables
• Embedded images / objects (\pict, \object)
• Indents, line spacing, tab stops
• Superscript / subscript

Building from source

dotnet build                       # all platforms (Windows TFM only builds on Windows)
dotnet build -f net10.0-android    # a single target
dotnet pack -c Release             # produce the NuGet package

Note: the net10.0-windows target only builds on a Windows host. The Windows rendering path should be compiled and smoke-tested on Windows before release.

License

DILLIGAF License v1.0 © 2026 Paul F. Johnson.