There are various version of the RTF format. The version some document uses may not be known to the user that tries to open it. I may also be unknown if LibreOffice supports this version of the format, and there may be bugs in the RTF import. You may assume that some RTF file has been imported without problems as there are no messages. This assumption may lead to a time consuming search for problems at the wrong places. The real life problem on what bug 83204 was based showed the error not so cleanly: Some formats worked and some did not. This fact contributed to confusion with respect to the outline numbering mechanism. Therefore the RTF import mechanism should report the version of the RTF format it recognized and how well LibreOffice supports this format, e.g. - no support (will not import files that use this version) - partial support (together with information specifying what will probably not work: wrong header information, images missing, maybe some subset of the problems collected in bug 81234) - full support (is expected to import all information contained in the file). I think there are many cases when this information can reduce considerably the effort to solve problems related to the RTF import. (Maybe it is a good idea that other import filters provide the same kind of information) Observed with LibreOffice version 4.2.5.2 and Windows 7.
VMiklos - Any thoughts on this one?
RTF is a no longer updated format, v1.9.1 is its final version. Microsoft stated it won't be possible to describe new features of MSO using this markup anymore. LO's RTF filter is based on this v1.9.1 specification. For OOXML / ODF, it makes sense to support different versions on export (but on import, we can just auto-detect the version, so no UI is needed), but I don't think this makes sense for RTF.