RTF
Rich Text Format

§ Why RTF?

RTF is a handy format for several reasons.

• RTF is a mature format. RTF's syntax is stable and straightforward, and its specification has existed for over a quarter century. In fact, while there has been a proliferation of incompatible binary formats calling themselves "Microsoft Word file format," RTF has stayed the course and evolved along backward-compatible lines. That means if you generate an RTF file today, you will be able to read it in 25 years, and you should have no trouble reading an RTF file generated 25 years ago.
• RTF is future-proof. Since RTF has been around for so long, just about every word processor since the early 1990s can understand it. While not every word processor understands every RTF feature perfectly, most of them understand the RTF commands discussed in this book quite well. Moreover, RTF is the data format for "rich text controls" in MSWindows APIs, and RTF-rendering APIs are part of the Carbon/Cocoa APIs in Mac OS X;
• Most people right now can open RTF. Besides RTF being future-proof, it's ubiquitous: If you email an RTF file to a dozen people you know, they can open it-- either right there in Google Docs
  [TODO: check interface details],
  or download the file and open it with a word processor like MSWord, LibreOffice, TextEdit that comes with MacOS, the write.exe [TODO: check new name] that comes with MSWindows. People who have never used a particular computer for word processing are likely to find that opening an RTF file will open it in word processors that they didn't know they even had.
• TLDR; it's everywhere forever.
• In RTF, format control is straightforward. In HTML, if you want to control the size and style of text or the positioning and justification of paragraphs, the best you can do is try a long detour through CSS, a standard that is erratically implemented even today. In RTF, font size and style, paragraph indenting, page breaks, page numbering, page headers and footers, widow-and-orphan control, and dozens of other features are each a simple single command.
• RTF is a multilingual format. RTF supports Unicode, so it can represent text in just about every human language ever written.
  [TODO: add some examples of Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese later in the text and, of course, emojis]
  These days, we can take Unicode supported for granted, since it works perfectly-- except when it totally fails and you end up with a screen full of "(τοῦ δὲ) λόγου."
• RTF is easy to generate. You can produce RTF without any knowledge of the font metrics needed for Adobe PostScript or PDF. In addition, since RTF files are text files, it's easy to produce RTF with a program in any programming language, whether it's Perl, Java, C++, Pascal, COBOL, Lisp, or anything in between. I've also discovered that people are generating RTF in "report generation" of complicated database queries, through programming languages that I've never heard of and which are that are "industry standard" in whole fields of science and industry that I've never heard of!
  
  Joel Spolsky, basically a hero of mine, wrote an article about the issue of trying to generate or manipulate binary formats Long story short: Don't. You can use HTML for simple stuff, and go for RTF for much of anything else.
  
  I once thought that eventually someone would invent a "works everywhere" document language that could subsume all of RTF's features. Something of the sort happened: ODF. To call it a massive disappointment is an understatement. It's like wanting a box of donuts and being handed a Soyuz rocket.

[ -todo- anything else need copying from this section of the book?]

And so it begins...

§ This Guide's Approach

-todo-

§ RTF "Hello, World!"

-todo-

§ Overview of Simple RTF

-todo-

§ Basic RTF Syntax

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§ Paragraphs

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§ Character Formatting

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§ Document Structure

-todo-

§ The {\*\command ... } Construct

-todo-

§ Faking comments with {\*\command ... }

-todo-

§ Language Tagging

-todo-

§ Newspaper Columns

-todo-

§ Footnotes

-todo-

§ Changing Text Color

-todo-

§ Hyperlinks

-todo- Change to just "Links"

-todo-

§ Page Margins

-todo-

§ Page Size and Orientation

-todo-

§ Line Drawing

-todo-

p060_horizrule_rtf

{\pard {\*\do
\dobxcolumn \dobypara \dodhgt7200
\dpline \dpptx0 \dppty0 \dpptx7200
\dppty0 \dpx0 \dpy0 \dpxsize7200
\dpysize0 \dplinew15
\dplinecor0 \dplinecog0 \dplinecob0 }\par}

§ Embedding Images

-todo-

[The section in the book is absolutely and completely banjaxed! Rewrite starting from scratch.]

-todo-

§ Overstrike in RTF

Some word-processing programs, such as WordPerfect, support a feature called overstrike, in which two (or more) characters can be printed one on top of each other. For example, an overstrike consisting of B and | would give you ฿, which happens to be the (otherwise usually unavailable) symbol for the Thai currency, the baht. Unfortunately, there's no way to express overstrikes in RTF, and no workaround that I know of.

§ Centering Vertically and Horizontally

-todo-

-todo-

p065_vhcenter_rtf

{\pard \pvmrg\phmrg\posxc\posyc \qc
\fs60 {\i Motherboard, May I?}
\line
\line\fs50 Screenplay by S. Burke
\line\fs40 Draft 7\par}
{\pard \page \par}

§ Symbols

-todo-

§ Styles

-todo-

-todo-

p069_styles_rtf

{\rtf1\ansi\deff0

{\fonttbl {\f0\fswiss Arial;}{\f1\froman Bookman;}}

{\stylesheet
{\s0 Normal;}
{\*\cs1 Default Paragraph Font;}
{\*\cs2 \additive \fs26\i\f1 \sbasedon1 ChannelName;}
{\*\cs3 \additive \fs26\i\f1\b \sbasedon2 PromoChannelName;}
{\s4 \li560\sa180 \sbasedon0 Listing_Item;}
}

\deflang1033\plain\fs24

{\pard
On February 19{\super th}, we at Keystone Kable TV will
 change the channel line-up.
 {\cs2 \fs26\i\f1 CSPAN} will move from channel 18 to channel 17.
 {\cs2 \fs26\i\f1 CSPAN-2} will move from channel 19 to channel 18.
 And a new channel,
 {\cs2 \fs26\i\f1 Classic Arts Showcase}, will
 be on channel 19. All hail cable television!!
\par}

{\pard
As a bonus, channel 20 will show
 {\cs3 \fs26\i\f1\b HBO-Espa\'f1ol} free for a month!
\par}

{\pard\sb180\sa180\qc ~\par}

{\pard \s4 \li560\sa180 17: CSPAN \par}
{\pard \s4 \li560\sa180 18: CSPAN-2 \par}
{\pard \s4 \li560\sa180 19: Classic Arts Showcase \par}
{\pard \s4 \li560\sa180 20: HBO-Espa\'f1ol \par}

}

§ Tables

-todo-

-todo-

p076a_table_single_cell_no_border_rtf

{\rtf1\ansi\deff0
{\fonttbl {\f0\fswiss Arial;}}
\deflang1033\plain\fs24

\trowd \trgaph180
\cellx1440
\pard\intbl Fee.\cell
\row


}

§ Example Programs

-todo-

§ A Datebook Generator

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§ A Directory Lister

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§ An Origami CD Case Maker

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§ The (Serious) Trouble With \bin

-todo-

Notes: it means RTF has two modes: normal parsing, and going out-of-band.

§RTF for MSWindows .HLP Help Files

The RTF book had a section on producing .hlp (Winhelp) files, because it was based on the documentation being in RTF. (And it was an extremely bizarre dialect, which I covered only because it was still in some legacy systems.) But, to quote Paul F. Tompkins, "we are living in a year with a 2 in front of it!" Microsoft stopped shipping the part of the OS that could read .hlp files. Nobody can read .hlp files, so nobody needs to know how to make them, so nobody needs to know the aspects of RTF that go into it all, so... that's why I'm not bothering to reproduce the parts of the RTF book that discussed it all. If, somehow, for some reason, you need to deal with RTF-for-winhelp and you have a question, just email me.

§ Remarks on Parsing

-todo-

§ Reference Tables

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§ ASCII-RTF Character Chart

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§ RTF Language Codes

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§ Converting to Twips

-todo-

[also: try making a downloadable printable twips ruler.]