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Re: How Can I Save the plain ASCII version of Formatted Text?

To: gettingstarted at lists dot realsoftware dot com
Subject: Re: How Can I Save the plain ASCII version of Formatted Text?
From: Emile Schwarz <emile dot a dot schwarz at wanadoo dot fr>
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 10:03:23 +0200
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References: <20040924170012 dot E8D8E48CE91 at lists dot realsoftware dot com>


gettingstarted-request at lists dot realsoftware dot com wrote:
Subject: Re: How Can I Save the plain ASCII version of Formatted Text?  
From: Seth Willits <seth at freaksw dot com>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 09:47:25 -0700

On Sep 24, 2004, at 5:39 AM, B Traver wrote:
Is RTF as popular on the Mac as it is in the Windows PC world (where it
is often used as a "common denominator" format between various word
processing programs, a format less precise than PDF but often
friendlier)?
Friendlier ?
This is the implementation that can be friendlier or not; the technology is what it is: a technology - a Microfsoft property - (a good technology in this case).


It is now. RTF was next to never used on Mac OS 9, because the only application that could work with it was Word. AppleWorks may have imported it,
Yes, AppleWorks knows how to 'deal' with rtf. First versions were able to read/write rtf. Alas, the style sheets were not used (only the line per line definition were used)... (1)

QuarkXPress (PageMaker probably too, but I do not remember) also knows about rtf. (1)

(1) These are for Mac OS 6, 7, 8 and 9...


I'm not sure, but basically, there was no free application that came with the system that used RTF. Now on Mac OS X, TextEdit uses RTF exclusively for its styled text since Cocoa has RTF capabilities built-in. I'm not sure how Carbon is supposed to have access to it, but it'd be pretty cool if RB had it built-in as well. Right now there's no way to have built-in cross platform styles in a friendly format.

Not really True; no REALbasic built-in xplatform is 100% True, but one can create a simple import/export module (or class if that one is good enough) to deal with styles in a X-Platform way.

From my point of view, the trouble comes when you start talking about \tab (not supported), stylesheets (ns), images (ns) and so on.


Résumé:
It is possible to deal with some styles (Bold, Italic, Underline), Font (Name, Size) on an X-Platform way.

Remember:
rtf is native on REALbasic for Windows (if you export/import As Styled EditField)... Barry Traver already knows that ;)

Unfortunately:
Do not expect from rtf: tab support, style sheet support, images, tables, etc. unless you implement that in REALbasic by yourself.

Emile


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