Gil, I tried opening a rtf file with less, and I couldn't find the text, just formatting. I need a console-mode editor. X-window editors are of course useless. When I looked at the books awaiting verification on bookshare.org I found that they had quite a few in .txt form. John On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Gil Andre wrote: > > 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! > > -- Computers to Help People, Inc. http://www.chpi.org 825 East Johnson; Madison, WI 53703