I've been thinking about the awful situation with RTF for a couple of weeks.
RTF is important because it's the standard interchange format. Almost all word processors can import and export it. This is sometimes sufficient reason for us not to support the native file format of a program. GUI elements support it. The textarea or similar control on Windows uses RTF. I'm pretty sure GTK has something similar and QT and Mac might. RTF is the standard format for formatted text on the clipboards of various OSs, window managers, etc. Without good RTF clipboard support, the clipboard is only useful for plain text. But there is a major problem - Nobody supports the same RTF. RTF is a "standard" but nobody implements the standard. MS Word might be considered the "defacto standard" but it's different from the true standard in many important aspects. An RTF importer which supports the standard will not import MS Word RTF well. AbiWord loads MS Word RTF quite well, missings features notwithstanding. MS WordPad is installed on every Windows machine by default and has been for a very long time. It reads MS Word .doc files and reads and writes RTF. For every Windows machine without MS Word installed, this is the standard .doc and RTF software. But WordPad's RTF is different to both the standard and to Word's RTF. AbiWord has signifigant problems, especially with lists, both importing and exporting MS WordPad RTF. Mac OS X has also embraced RTF. The standard Mac text editor has been upgraded from the OS 9 days and now supports full Unicode and its default save format is RTF. But the OS X text editor creates drastically different RTF from all of the standard, MS Word, and MS WordPad. For rvery Mac with OS X installed, this is the standard editor. The OS X version of RTF has been called broken and I bet it is. Yet MS Word and MS WordPad has no problems with any OS X RTF file I can find. AbiWord cannot load OS X RTF at all. OpenOffice also supports a broken version of RTF. At least in this case, being open source, there is reasonable hope that it can be fixed if people want it fixed. We cannot currently load OpenOffice RTF. OpenOffice has recently decided to lower the priority of RTF support in favour of better Word .doc support. This is not going to help document interchange between open source word processors, and it's definitely going to make clipboard support weaker. I don't know the status of RTF with other open source editors such as KWord. If AbiWord has such problems with all of these very common flavours of RTF, what hope do we have importing the many various flavours output by minor and exotic word processors such as those developed for specific languages. What the open source community needs is a standard RTF library much like exists for various image file formats, and even more like our own Wv. Such an RTFlib must be designed with a robust parser able to cope with the worst of known RTF attrocities and be at least as forgiving as MS Word's RTF importer. Its output should be the most useful compromise between adhering to the standard, and satisfying MS Word. AbiWord, OpenOffice, KWord, and whoever else could contribute to it instead of duplicating the effort by reinventing the wheel each time and risking the introduction of one more variety of RTF which only works with one or two programs. I'd start this immediately myself but as you know I have no job, no money, no computer, and no internet yet - so I'm probably not the best person. But if somebody on this list knows the best ways to get the ear of OpenOffice, and which other open source projects would benefit from this. I guess finding the maintainers of current existing RTF importers, exporters, and converters would be a good place to start. Any ideas? Andrew Dunbar. ===== http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com
