Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Fri, 26 Jan 2007, David Moberg wrote:

> sindi keesan wrote:
> > Leave a space after each of these tags:
> >
> > {\rtf                   start rtf file
>
> Good idea: writing RTF by hand. I didn't know it was this easy.

It can be a lot more complex.

> > \page                   new page (difficult to do in HTML
>
> HTML is for hypertext, not printing.

I know, that makes it less suitable as a wordprocessing language.

> > default font and font size and colors.
>
> Wikipedia has this example, which sets fonts:

I don't ever need to set fonts.  I either print on my dot-matrix printer 
(with hardware controls) or send to someone who chooses their own fonts.


> "As an example, the following RTF code:
>
> {\rtf1\ansi{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss Helvetica;}\f0
> Hello!\par
> This is some {\b bold} text.\par
> }"

That looks like a quicker way to do bold than what I did:
\b bold \b0 [2 extra characters including spaces]

\par at line end makes more sense (like <br>

> RTF spec is here: http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/RTF-Spec-1.0.txt
>
> "  ...
>  {\colortbl;\red0\green0\blue0;\red0\green0\blue255;}
>  ...
>
> The following example defines a block of text in color (where
> supported). Note that the cf/cb index is the index of an entry in the
> color table, which represents a red/green/blue color combination.
>
>  ...
>  {\f1\cb1\cf2 This is colored text. The background is color
>  1 and the foreground is color 2.
>  ..."

Nobody has asked me for colored text yet.  Abiword puts in a lot of 
(to-me) garbage about fonts and colors which only make the file a lot 
longer than what I created manually.  Or pictures.

> Pictures can also be added, although it's probably best to distribute
> them as a compressed raster bitmap format or PS/PDF.
>
> > For more tags see http:\\keesan.freeshell.org\bl.rtf.txt .

> http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/ has a link to rtf.txt, which is a
> redirect to http://sdf.lonestar.org/403.html. "This URL could not be
> accessed due to one or more of the following reasons:
> The file or parent directory did not have appropriate permissions (run
> mkhomepg -p at the shell)
> The server is actually experiencing problems (check the ANNOUNCE
> bboard at the shell)
> Sincerely,
>
> The SDF..."

I copied rtf.txt there again and it seems okay. Does it work now?

Microsoft posted about 100 pages of rtf specs online.

> > This could be sent to anyone using MS WORD,
>
> Abiword apparently renames RTFs to DOCs, and Word will open them.

If you tell it to export WORD it exports rtf, I think.

> > One could also do search and replace instead of typing the tags out.
> > Other ideas?
>
> An advanced console mode editor (I think vim and vde are in this
> category) will let you bind keys to various modes, and display the
> formatting as you type, using vt100 terminal escape sequences.

There is a vi in the busybox I compiled and I have vde under dosemu.

Could I type Ctrl-B to get a '{/b ' for instance?

The advantage of typing HTML is you can toggle lynx to display text 
(formatted) or HTML.  It would work for single pages.  Unfortunately 
mdacon can't show underlines and the VGA monitor shows them as colors.
I have DOS lynx, which will show bold and underline.  I don't know of a 
text-mode RTF viewer that preserves bold/underline.

Type HTML, convert (online?) to RTF, add /page ?

I may try RTF for the Czech certificate I just got.  Display the pdf file 
on the VGA monitor (pdfimages, zgv) and type on the TTL monitor.  Or 
splitvt.

> David