RTF Pocket Guide

by Sean M. Burke

Book Overview

Rich Text Format, or RTF, is the internal markup language used by Microsoft Word and understood by dozens of other word processors. RTF is a universal file format that pervades practically every desktop. Because RTF is text, it's much easier to generate and process than binary .doc files. Any programmer working with word processing documents needs to learn enough RTF to get around, whether it's to format text for Word (or almost any other word processor),...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596004753
• ISBN13: 9780596004750
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 149 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.6" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

The RTF Pocket Guide - A Review

Sean M Burke has written the RTF Pocket Guide, The RTF Cookbook and other technical materials on the Rich Text Format (RTF). These writings are worthwhile, and should be mandatory reading for anyone attempting to program RTF readers or writers. In my case, I needed to produce neat, printable reports from an Excel application written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). (It is not commonly known that many Visual Basic features are not supported in VBA, including the ones I required for my output.) After some research, I concluded that adding an RTF writer to my application would produce a quality product with limited additional programming. Microsoft's RTF Specification version 1.9 is NOT the place to learn RTF. It is very complete, but anything but a text book. Sean M Burke's writings brought me from the stage of RTF novice to an adequate programmer of complicated financial tables in short order. Thank you, Sean. Robert J Lambird

Great, easy to follow book on RTF

This book saved me A LOT of time. I had to use PHP to write an RTF document with style definitions to be used in Word and Adobe InDesign. I spent a ton of time searching the web for tutorials or tips, but they were all complicated and incomplete. I also tried going through the source code of MS Word documents trying to figure out how it was written. After a lot of frustration, I found this book. It's short and easy to read and understand. It gives you the basics on how to construct an RTF file with code that is clean, easy to read, and easy to debug. It was just what I needed. I can't beleive there isn't any tutorial like this available on the web. I did still have to look at the MS Word code to fix a couple of things, and I also used an online reference to figure out some of the more obscure codes, but overall this book was very helpful. I recommend it.

Really good content and very poor editing

RTF Pocket Guide is an extremely useful guide to RTF and makes for much better and faster reading than Microsoft's RTF specs. As the book itself points out, it is an introductory guide and does not discuss parsing RTF documents as well as it does creating them. It gave me the information I needed to create programs to write database data out as RTF and certainly does a great job of explaining syntax and constructs. As mentioned in other reviews, however, the editing for the July 2003 first edition is simply awful. A number of obvious errors exist in the initial sections. The overall content is so good that these errors are all the more glaring: How could an editor read the text and not catch them? If you treat these errors as opportunities to test your own growing knowledge of RTF syntax, they are actually kind of fun to find... but not what you would expect in a reference text. I have not found any obtuse errors; most are obvious as soon as you read them. Overall: well worth the money, but also an imperfect tool at best.

Little Gem

This little gem saved me a lot of time and hassle. RTF is notoriously under-documented and your only option (AFAIK), until now, was to wade through a dense and cryptic 150+ page spec. I needed to generate word processor files from DB data and I wanted to avoid the messy XML, XSLT, FO, Gee-Whizz-ML overkill at all costs. This guide enabled me to knock up a working program in just a few hours. Yes, the book has some omissions, but you cannot condense the RTF spec into a pocket guide.Unfortunately the author has been let down by poor copy editing. There are some non-trivial errors such as "The syntax for a font table is {colortbl...", and there are quite a few woolly sentences here and there. But that's par for the course with cutbacks at publishing houses these days.Overall, if you need generate WP docs from an app, this little guide is worth it's weight in gold.

necessary preface to MS RTF Specs

RTF Pocket Guide is a slim volumn, but its size belies the wealth of explanation it contains. Even a cursory reading will leave you with a much better understanding of something almost all programmers know a little about. ...(Parenthetically, I like topic-specific computer books, O'Reilly's Pocket Guides and Wrox's Handbooks).The book's stated intent is to offer an introduction to Rich Text Format, and is a valuable preface to Microsoft's Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification. It does a good job of that, offering both analysis and caveats. Now, if I don't offer a criticism or two this post will sound like it was done by the Marketing Department. 1. I'd like to see the Perl code in the addendums translated into C# or VB. That probably would make it more accessible to more users.2. I wish the chapter on section breaks were fuller than it is. (Probably not a big deal for most programmers.)I'd strongly recommend this book for any programmer needing to work with RTF files.