Hi,
On Fri, 14 Jun 2002 10:00:14 -0500 (CDT), John wrote:
> It seems that bookshare.org prefers rich text or rtf files. Plain teeext
> files are also acceptable. I'm wondering why they chose rtf and not html.
RTF files are actually highly portable. It's (in fact) the
only file format that Microsoft has ever officially published,
even though they keep modifying it with each release of Word...
<grin>
This being said, RTF also offers slightly better text formatting
than HTML, which is probably why it was chosen.
> Where can I find programs that can handle rtf? I've been told that
> ali-word and OpenOffice can do se, but I suspect that they require
> X-window.
Under X-Windows, Abiword, OpenOffice and Ted (and most other
"office" clones out there, like KWord) should be able to open
RTF files.
In the worst possible case, you should be able to open the
RTF file under "less", "vi", "emacs" or any other competent
text pager: it's plain ASCII text, with a lot of formatting
commands thrown in for good measure.
I haven't been able to find RTF-to-Text utility out there,
but writing a quick parser/cleaner utility with sed should
be possible. Let me know if you are interested.
Hope this helps!
--
Gil Andre gandre@arkeia.com
Technical Writer
Arkeia Corp. http://www.arkeia.com