Customer Reviews

RTF Pocket Guide

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This little gem saved me a lot of time and hassle. RTF is notoriously under-documented and your only option (AFAIK), until now, was to wade through a dense and cryptic 150+ page spec. I needed to generate word processor files from DB data and I wanted to avoid the messy XML, XSLT, FO, Gee-Whizz-ML overkill at all costs. This guide enabled me to knock up a working program in just a few hours. Yes, the book has some omissions, but you cannot condense the RTF spec into a pocket guide.

Unfortunately the author has been let down by poor copy editing. There are some non-trivial errors such as "The syntax for a font table is {colortbl...", and there are quite a few woolly sentences here and there. But that's par for the course with cutbacks at publishing houses these days.

Overall, if you need generate WP docs from an app, this little guide is worth it's weight in gold.

RTF Pocket Guide is a slim volumn, but its size belies the wealth of explanation it contains. Even a cursory reading will leave you with a much better understanding of something almost all programmers know a little about.

...

(Parenthetically, I like topic-specific computer books, O'Reilly's Pocket Guides and Wrox's Handbooks).

The book's stated intent is to offer an introduction to Rich Text Format, and is a valuable preface to Microsoft's Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification. It does a good job of that, offering both analysis and caveats.

Now, if I don't offer a criticism or two this post will sound like it was done by the Marketing Department.
1. I'd like to see the Perl code in the addendums translated into C# or VB. That probably would make it more accessible to more users.
2. I wish the chapter on section breaks were fuller than it is. (Probably not a big deal for most programmers.)

I'd strongly recommend this book for any programmer needing to work with RTF files.

RTF Pocket Guide is an extremely useful guide to RTF and makes for much better and faster reading than Microsoft's RTF specs. As the book itself points out, it is an introductory guide and does not discuss parsing RTF documents as well as it does creating them. It gave me the information I needed to create programs to write database data out as RTF and certainly does a great job of explaining syntax and constructs.

As mentioned in other reviews, however, the editing for the July 2003 first edition is simply awful. A number of obvious errors exist in the initial sections. The overall content is so good that these errors are all the more glaring: How could an editor read the text and not catch them? If you treat these errors as opportunities to test your own growing knowledge of RTF syntax, they are actually kind of fun to find... but not what you would expect in a reference text. I have not found any obtuse errors; most are obvious as soon as you read them.

Overall: well worth the money, but also an imperfect tool at best.

There was more introductory and expository material in the book than I would have expected for a pocket guide weighing in it only a scant 150 pages. In addition, the reference I would have expected, which would allow me to navigate an RTF exported from Word, I did not find.

I recommend this to anyone who has some experience working with RTF and who wants to try to actually understand it. For those looking for an RTF decoder ring, you won't find it here.

Sean M Burke has written the RTF Pocket Guide, The RTF Cookbook and other technical materials on the Rich Text Format (RTF). These writings are worthwhile, and should be mandatory reading for anyone attempting to program RTF readers or writers.
In my case, I needed to produce neat, printable reports from an Excel application written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). (It is not commonly known that many Visual Basic features are not supported in VBA, including the ones I required for my output.) After some research, I concluded that adding an RTF writer to my application would produce a quality product with limited additional programming.

Microsoft's RTF Specification version 1.9 is NOT the place to learn RTF. It is very complete, but anything but a text book. Sean M Burke's writings brought me from the stage of RTF novice to an adequate programmer of complicated financial tables in short order. Thank you, Sean.
Robert J Lambird

This book saved me A LOT of time. I had to use PHP to write an RTF document with style definitions to be used in Word and Adobe InDesign. I spent a ton of time searching the web for tutorials or tips, but they were all complicated and incomplete. I also tried going through the source code of MS Word documents trying to figure out how it was written. After a lot of frustration, I found this book. It's short and easy to read and understand. It gives you the basics on how to construct an RTF file with code that is clean, easy to read, and easy to debug. It was just what I needed. I can't beleive there isn't any tutorial like this available on the web. I did still have to look at the MS Word code to fix a couple of things, and I also used an online reference to figure out some of the more obscure codes, but overall this book was very helpful. I recommend it.

I would have to agree with the reviewers that stated that this book is more of an introduction to RTF than a reference guide. While certain parts of the book such as part on Tables were helpful, there were some glaring deficiencies.
For example, regarding Sections the author states: "Sections are not discussed elsewhere in this book, because they only come up in certain formatting features that are beyond the scope of this condensed guide. The only notable exceptions are page header settings and newspaper columns." (pgs. 54, 55)
I believe this is a miopic view of Sections. Sections are used anywhere you need to create a physical or logical break in the documentation. Headers, footers, and newspaper columns are only a few of the potential uses for Sections. We are currently using continuous Sections to hide/show selected text blocks to customize our documentation based upon user selections. In fact, I bought this book specifically to learn more about Sections, but have since returned to digesting the RTF 1.5 spec. on the subject.

I was really looking forward to this book as I have been fighting the rtf spec for over a year.

First off, this is not a reference like the other Pocket References from O'Reilly. It is a basic intro to rtf (and in all fairness it does say that in the begining of the book).

But even as in intro, it covers very little. For example, nothing about lists (ie bulleted or numbered paragraphs). So it's very very basic.

Second, it's wrong in places. The biggest mistake I saw was that it says you cannot embed jpeg or png files in a rtf file. You can and it's well documented in the Microsoft spec.

In short, if you know nothing about rtf, this is an ok start. But that's about it.

- dave

The author has asked me to add the following - which I do agree with: "The biggest mistake I saw is that it missed a simple way to embed jpg's and png's in documents, and instead suggested complicated workarounds."