You get one constructor in Ruby.  You want to save it for something really important, or something that's central to its existence.  That's not what "rtf_content" is.

For example, let's say you wanted to use a RTF class, but instead of providing it the content you wanted to provide it with a file location.  Well, tough luck, RTF now requires that the file is already read before you can instantiate the class.

I tried a "parse" method here, since it deals with content.  This could work with a file later, with a "RTF.open" or whatever.