I'd revise your statement:

> Anybody looking for a project this smells like a good one

to:

Anybody looking for a project, this smells.

RTF is an unpleasant format. The basic spec might be okay for creating a writer, but creating a reader that will handle arbitrary RTF is quite hard.

Thus speaks someone who has just spent the last five months dealing with RTF parsing.

--
$,="\n";foreach(split('',"\3\3\3c>\0>c\177cc\0~c~``\0cc\177cc")) {$a++;$_=unpack('B8',$_);tr,01,\40#,;$b[$a%6].=$_};print@b,"\n"