Hannah wrote:

>>Thank you. Be, however, advised, that not everyone can read RTF. RTF
>>is a Microsoft proprietary format and not everyone is running software
>>by Microsoft or always running behind their proprietary file formats.

sortof - RTF (rich text format) is a simple non-proprietary format which
can be used cross-platform, by any word processor. however, all versions
of Microsoft Word since 98 have replaced that with MS-RTF, and continued to
use the .rtf file extension, even though it varies significantly from
non-MS RTF, and results in transferring RTF files between Word and any
other word processor changing all characters which require an extended set
according to different charts.

so Word can't properly read RTF, and everything else can't properly read
MS-RTF, and you can't tell which you're dealing with until you load it in
your word processor and see whether all the extended characters are
interpreted correctly or not.

I just took a look, and the Chapter One on the site is in MS-RTF, so while
the situation around RTF is a bit complicated, the result is exactly as you
describe - only MS products can accurately display MS-RTF - and the file
format is so proprietary that it is explicitly illegal for a non-MS program
to either read or convert MS-RTF files... which is the exact opposite of
the reason why RTF was originally developed in 1990.

Ed wrote:

>AbiWord is a fairly lightweight Free Software Unix word processor which
>uses RTF as its main format. It's in the OpenBSD ports/packages
>collection. I'm pretty sure translator utilities such as rtf2text are
>available for unix as well.

I'm not familiar with AbiWord, but RTF-Tools hasn't been updated since
April of 1994 - because it's stable and it works properly for all RTF files
before Word 98 came out, and it's illegal to update it to convert MS-RTF to
text. the software and documentation for RTF-Tools is at:

http://www.primate.wisc.edu/software/RTF/

-Selv, using MacOS 8.6, WinNT 4, BSDi 4, FreeBSD 4 and SunOS 5.7...

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