From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Sep 15 2002 - 23:57:31 EDT
--- Martin Sevior <msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au>
wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-09-16 at 13:06, Andrew Dunbar wrote:
> > --- 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.
>
> Hi Andrew,
> WordPad plain-out breaks RTF for lists. It
> was frankly too much work to code around it's
> bugginess for me. Feel free to fix it. I can provide
> pointers.
That's fine and I accept it. I was just a little
worried that we were talking in terms of "wontfix"
rather than in terms of "that'd be good but it's a low
priority".
> Make sure to not break out current working
> implementation for non-buggy readers. I think it
> would have taken me a month to get it right.
Absolutely. Whenever there's a conflict between
handling broken RTF and handling Word RTF, Word must
take precedence. Handling Word RTF probably has to
take precedence over handling "standard RTF" too ):
> MS Word imports your resume perfectly. WordPad put's
> two bullet symbols when it should have put one.
I know but how does it make me look if a potential
employer happens to open it in MSWord for whatever
reason and see, hmm this guy works on AbiWord and it
created this mess, he mustn't be too good.
That's the egocentric view, but more importantly if
it does it to me it does it to all the users.
> At some point you've got to cut your losses.
Agreed 100%
Andrew.
> Cheers
>
> Martin
>
>
=====
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