You're right to a degree. We get stuff in a variety of formats from different 
systems. Some are plain text, some are RTF, some are strongly typed classes of 
data, etc. So RTF is a source type that we have no control over.

We also investigated the option of converting RTF to HTML and displaying that 
in a Html control (I tried all the control vendors controls here as well). 
Essentially they 'cheat' by putting a browser element into Silverlight. The 
result is that nothing can render over the top of the HTML; its always on top. 
In our case we do need menus to render over the HTML. There are other 
work-arounds for this problem but they degrade the user experience.

PDF is possible; we could convert to PDF on the server side and return a link 
to the PDF file. However we are looking for a richer embedded experience where 
the content being displayed looks like it is part of the page. I'm not sure 
that we could achieve that with PDF.

It's a shame that we're up to version 4 of SL and still have to make 
compromises. I'm too stubborn for that. :)
However I also realise that it's a niche problem and SL can't accommodate all 
scenarios.
Steven Nagy
Readify | Senior Developer
M: +61 404 044 513 | E: [email protected]<sip:[email protected]> | 
B: azure.snagy.name<http://azure.snagy.name/>

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Barry Beattie
Sent: Saturday, 15 May 2010 8:50 AM
To: ozSilverlight
Subject: Re: RTF in silverlight

just putting on my BA hat for a second

I know the service call is spitting out RTF, but why RTF and not, say, PDF? it 
sounds like you just need to render them, not interact with them.

just curious



On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Steven Nagy 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Thanks for the various responses.

The Telerik control - I couldn't see that it supported RTF. Its funny because 
there's lots of RichTextbox controls out there but very few actually support 
RTF (most have their own versions of WPF's FlowDocument instead).

I suspect these issues are because different companies have different 
implementations of the specification. Plus the specification has many versions.
Plus some writers/readers may be more tolerant to invalid control codes, while 
others are more strict. What the world needs is an RTF validator where you can 
post your RTF.

I didn't know Silverlight supported XPS, I'll investigate that option.

Thanks for the sample Carl, I actually need RTF though, including image data 
which is embedded in the RTF as binary. Pretty much fill RTF support in SL is 
required.

Tried the ComponentOne control as well - didn't seem to support tables properly 
either. This seems to be a common problem.

Thanks again all.
Steven Nagy
Readify | Senior Developer
M: +61 404 044 513 | E: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 
| B: azure.snagy.name<http://azure.snagy.name/>

From: 
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
 
[mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>]
 On Behalf Of jason schluter
Sent: Saturday, 15 May 2010 1:02 AM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: RE: RTF in silverlight

Perhaps you can convert it to XPS?
________________________________
From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 13 May 2010 16:31:31 -0700
Subject: RTF in silverlight
Hi all,

I've got the a bunch of RTF coming from a service call that needs to render.
I have two options: Find a control that can render RTF or convert the RTF to 
something else on the server side that can be rendered natively.

For option 1, it seems the new SL4 RichTextbox doesn't support RTF (unless I've 
missed the mechanism for importing RTF text into the control?). I've trialed 
the DevExpress tool but it fails to render RTF with tables. I'm currently 
pulling down the ComponentOne RichTextbox to see if it does any better.

I've also tried option 2 - using a WPF rich textbox (in memory only) to load 
the RTF and then push out various output formats. It supports output to XAML 
but of course the XAML is not compliant with Silverlight.

I have my fingers crossed for the component one control but I'm not hopeful. I 
was wondering if anyone had any other suggestions on how to approach this and 
if anyone has found a good RTF control for silverlight.

Client side is SL4 and server side is .Net 4.0.

Cheers,

Steven Nagy
Readify | Senior Developer
M: +61 404 044 513 | E: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 
| B: azure.snagy.name<http://azure.snagy.name/>

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