RTF Pocket Guide (Paperback)

by Sean M. Burke (Author)
Key Phrases: help compiler, case maker, neque decemviralis potestas ultra biennium, Incidental Features, Times New Roman, Monotype Corsiva (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
There are many formats for documents, and few are as difficult to parse as Rich Text Format (RTF), the internal format for Microsoft Word. Unlike structured formats such as XML and SGML, or even the less structured formats such as HTML or Troff, RTF reduces all styles, formats, fonts, etc., to pure presentational commands. It's filled with arcane, redundant, incomprehensible markup. Why use RTF then? Because we have to. Microsoft® Word is a ubiquitous application, and love it or hate it, we're stuck with it. So we frequently find ourselves having to deal with RTF files, either to convert to or from another format, or to make global changes. Additionally, there is little or no printed documentation for RTF. You can't always stop to search for the piece of information you need online--or take the time to wade through irrelevant or even erroneous online information. When you need to get to a solution quickly, the new RTF Pocket Guide is the book you'll want to have.

About the Author
Burke is an active member of the Perl community. Trained as a linguist, he also develops tools for software internationalization and native language preservation.

Product Details

• Paperback: 156 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 1 edition (July 22, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596004753
• ISBN-13: 978-0596004750
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #352,745 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This item is part of The O'Reilly Pocket Guides Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Little Gem, November 14, 2003

By A Customer

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.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars necessary preface to MS RTF Specs, August 7, 2003

By	Clarion - See all my reviews

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Really good content and very poor editing, August 12, 2005

By	R. Gauer (New Mexico) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.