From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Sep 15 2002 - 23:06:14 EDT
--- Dom Lachowicz <doml@appligent.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-09-13 at 04:53, Andrew Dunbar wrote:
>
> > Oh don't forget to check against MW WordPad and
> > the RTF that Mac OS X uses too. Hub can probably
> > get you an OS X sample if you need one.
> >
> > Our RTF already seems to have some dependencies on
> > either the standard or MS Word and could be more
> > forgiving.
>
> In all honesty, MSWord is the de-facto standard. By
> *far* it is the #1 producer and consumer of RTF, and
> should be used as the guide where the spec is
> lacking - for this reason, and for the reasons that
> MSFT owns the spec.
This is certainly true yet when I complain about
problems between our RTF and Word's (list support
which makes a mess of my resume) all I hear back is
that we won't fix it because MS isn't sticking to the
standard. That won't get us anywhere. RTF is an
exchange format and, broken or not, this is the most
important format for interoperability and at least as
an ideal goal we should strive to read in even what
seems to be mangled in one way or another.
I know Word and WordPad handle each-other's RTF pretty
much perfectly even though they're not the same.
> The RTF that MacOSX and Cocoa produces is crap.
> Likewise for OpenOffice.
> However, OSX seems always able to render our RTF to
> some reasonable degree. It isn't perfect, but I
> imagine that is because their TextPad product
> certainly isn't their #1 priority, and it shows.
I know it's a pain in the arse to support this type of
crap but that's one of the problem with standards -
especially with file formats. There's just so much
room to move for each implementor and they seem to be
happy with "what mostly works for them".
That doesn't mean we should just be happy to fail to
import them. What other choice do we have? Tell
people to open all broken RTF files with MS Word first
and save it out again before loading it into AbiWord?
> OpenOffice has
> given up on their RTF work in favor of better DOC
> support. This is understandable, but unfortunate, as
> their product produces/consumes non-conformant RTF
> 1.2 while we do pretty-darn-good RTF 1.7.
It's a shame they've done this and it can't mean good
things for clipboard support between our two apps for
one example.
I also agree that our RTF is pretty good and I'm not
trying to cut anyone down. Just stating my opinion
that it's better for everyone to have an open mind
about trying our best rather than resting on our
laurels and ending up with RTF which is compliant but
only works with AbiWord and MS Word.
Andrew Dunbar.
> Dom
>
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
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