RTF Pocket Guide

RTF Pocket Guide

by Sean M. Burke
Released July 2003
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781449367589

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Book description

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.

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Table of contents

  1. RTF Pocket Guide
  2. A Note Regarding Supplemental Files
  3. 1. RTF Tutorial
    1. Why RTF?
    2. This Book’s Approach
    3. RTF “Hello, World!”
    4. Overview of Simple RTF
    5. Basic RTF Syntax
      1. Newlines and Spaces in RTF
    6. Paragraphs
      1. About {\pard ... \par}
      2. Controlling Paragraph Justification and Centering
      3. Spacing Between Paragraphs
      4. Paragraph Indenting
      5. Paragraphs and Pagebreaks
      6. Double-Spacing
      7. Exact Paragraph Positioning
    7. Character Formatting
      1. Basic Character Formatting
      2. Font Commands
      3. Advice About {...} Groups
      4. RTF Escapes
        1. Escapes
        2. Nonbreaking space
        3. Nonbreaking hyphen
        4. Hyphenation point
      5. The \plain Formatting Command
      6. Unicode in RTF
        1. Support for the Unicode escapes
    8. Document Structure
      1. Document Prolog
      2. Font Table
      3. Color Table
      4. Stylesheet
      5. Info Group
        1. Defaults for some metadata fields
      6. Preliminaries
      7. Content
      8. End of Document
    9. Incidental Features
      1. The {\*\command ... } Construct
        1. Faking comments with {\*\command ... }
      2. Language Tagging
      3. Newspaper Columns
        1. Columns and sections
      4. Footnotes
      5. Changing Text Color
      6. Hyperlinks
      7. Page Margins
      8. Page Size and Orientation
      9. Line Drawing
      10. Embedding Images
      11. Overstrike in RTF
      12. Centering Vertically and Horizontally
      13. Symbols
    10. Styles
      1. Styles as the User Experiences Them
      2. Styles as They Are Represented
      3. RTF Stylesheet Syntax
      4. \sbasedon and Style Updating
        1. \additive on character style declarations
        2. Generating RTF: With or without styles?
    11. Tables
      1. One Row at a Time
      2. Building Tables
      3. Content that Stretches Rows
      4. Starting Tables Away from the Left Margin
      5. Widths-to-Offsets as an Algorithm
      6. Adding Borders
      7. Vertical Alignment in Cells
      8. Horizontal Alignment in Cells
      9. Horizontal and Vertical Alignment in Cells
  4. 2. Creating MS Windows Help Files
    1. Help-RTF Basics
    2. Hyperlinks and Popups
    3. More Topic Information
    4. Images
    5. Help-RTF’s Peculiarities
    6. Learning More
  5. 3. Example Programs
    1. A Datebook Generator
    2. A Directory Lister
    3. An Origami CD Case Maker
    4. An RTF Metadata Extractor
    5. Remarks on Parsing
  6. 4. Reference Tables
    1. ASCII-RTF Character Chart
    2. RTF Language Codes
    3. Converting to Twips
  7. Index
  8. About the Author
  9. Copyright

Product information

  • Title: RTF Pocket Guide
  • Author(s): Sean M. Burke
  • Release date: July 2003
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781449367589