Conversely, if you want to write RTFs easily from Python, you can use the third-party module rtflib. It's a fairly new and incomplete module but still very powerful and useful. Below is an example that writes "hello world" in rich text to an RTF called helloworld.rtf. This is a very primitive example, and the module can also be used to add colors, italics, tables, and many other aspects of rich text to RTF files.
from rtflib import *
file = RTF("helloworld.rtf")
file.startfile()
file.addstrict()
file.addtext("hello world")
file.writeout()
