RTF Pocket Guide

by Sean M. Burke

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), to make global changes to an existing document, or to convert Word files to (or from) another format. RTF Pocket Guide is a concise and easy-to-use tutorial and quick-reference for anyone who occasionally ends up mired in RTF files. As the first published book to cover the RTF format in any detail, this small pocket guide explains the syntax of RTF with examples throughout, including special sections on Unicode RTF and MSHelp RTF, and several full programs that demonstrate how to work in RTF effectively. Most word processors produce RTF documents consisting of arcane and redundant markup. This book is the first step to finding order in the disorder of RTF.

156 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 2003

Reviews

[Apple84 Wylie · Rating 3 out of 5]

RTF is a powerful--albeit antiquated and somewhat obfuscated--system for marking up text. Most people probably have read an RTF file before in their OS's native RTF reader... or have saved a Microsoft Word document as Rich Text Format. Sean Burke's handy little pocket book is one of the few sources of information for dealing with the markup language directly. I cannot in good conscience recommend writing RTF markup manually (as one might HTML)--however, if you are a programmer having to write, export, or parse raw RTF, then this book is a good starting point and a great reference to have on your bookshelf. The book is small and concise. One quibble: a book this slim really should have jettisoned the section on "Creating MS Windows Help Files" in favor of something more universal and practical (e.g., dealing with headers & footers). As an added bonus: the author is a nice guy, having answered a question I had about an RTF project within a single day of emailing. There are a couple of errors in the book, so be sure to grab the errata from the publisher's site.