Re: tlug: RTF interchange format

[Jason Molenda <crash@example.com>]

Stephen wrote:

> That contains several half-truths.  (I doubt your correspondent is
> sufficiently well-informed to justify labeling them lies.)  RTF is not
> Microsoft-sponsored, it is a MIME standard.  Because it is a slightly
> enhanced form of text/plain, if a person can't read the content with
> "less", it's not RTF as defined by MIME.  


This is where I get confused.  I've seen RichText, and yeah, it's
pretty obvious what it is all about.  Then I've seen .RTF files that MS
Word can output, and they're not at all like the RichText things I've
seen.  They look a lot like postscript (in terms of protocol overhead)
to me.  I remember that MS would change the RTF standard (which is
available on the 'net...at least in MS Word format har har har har)
whenever they felt like it, so free software implementations of RTF
were hard to keep up to date.

Anyway, I think these are two different beasts altogether--.RTF files
are pretty much an ASCII representation of Microsoft Word's proprietary
internal format.  

(not that I've actually spent time looking in to this at all.  Please
feel free to correct me if anyone knows better about this)

Jason
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