Ee bye gum eck mi owd fettler!
That theer Dbase file I migrated worra sales ledger for a chain of retail shops, the memo fields only contained unformatted notes. It was at that time, a big file at 3meg! The opening screen, of the latest software packages is bigger than that
Dbase4 and Foxpro are database manipulation tools using dbf files, they are not word processors. Foxpro is also a program creation platform but I am not sure if Dbase goes that far.
I have been using Foxpro for years and gone through all the different versions from DOS to the Visual Studio Version I use today. For the type of work I do, software design solutions it is excellent but for your use it is entirely inappropriate.
The guys at one of my clients produce an excellent in house magazine using Quark Express. That is a proper publishing program and would do everything you needed and more.
As for rtf, I have had nightmares with that too. In theory, it is cross platform compliant but when you look at the codes and control structure, every version is different and causes no end of problems. I have been creating HTML files from some old RTF formatted Church Newsletters and all goes well until some unknown code throws the whole page into chaos.