I have tried LibreOffice, and Abiword on Linux Mint 13, and in both cases, on the sorts of RTF files I use (lots of font changes, language changes, color changes, underlining, etc.), the application always end up getting slower and slower over time with saves to the files, and the files get larger and larger, beyond what their content would seem to indicate the size should be (and as noted below, what Mac OS X TextEdit thinks they should be).
For example, LibreOffice had written one file to be about 3MB, and it could barely open this file, it took literally minutes. I transferred this 3MB RTF file to a Mac, opened and saved the file in TextEdit, and the file size reduced to 26KB with no loss of content! After copying back to linux, thereafer, LibreOffice/AbiWord were relatively fast to open and save that one file, but the problem is repeated on lots of files.
The RTF files originally came from a Windows system – the hard disk crashed, but I was able to recover the data and migrated it to a new disk running Linux Mint 13. The files were mostly edited with Microsoft Word and Wordpad.
Are Word/Wordpad known to create "toxic" RTF files for LibreOffice/Abiword?
How can I clean up the files and edit them on Linux just as I could on OS X, for example?