Folks,

I think that having a TextEdit or WordPad like editor in Squeak would bring numerous benefits not only to the core Squeak programming community, but to others currently under-utilizing Squeak or not using it at all. It would immediately make BookMorphs an order of magnitude more useable by non-programmers and scripting types. If there is ever going to be a market where Squeak-based solutions have significant economic value, script-oriented developers will almost certainly play a major role and they will need interoperability with formatted text. Imagine a Squeak demo that turns a folder of RTF documents into a Morphic presentation or shows them in a Wonderland! Anyone would be able to take their documents, and experience the power of Squeak directly! The impact that this would have on people's perception of Squeak would be enormous. 

Although PDF would be better, as has been mentioned, PDF is significantly more complicated and therefore IMO, not likely to get done by a community lacking significant revenue generation activities. Another alternative mentioned is HTML, but to be really useful, an HTML oriented text editor would have to support CSS which doesn't seem to be a walk in the park. Though I think RTF is a good place to start, support for any of the above-mentioned widely recognized formats would be a boon to the Squeak environment and the Squeak environment is what really sets Squeak apart from other programming languages.

Somewhere out there, an under or un-employed hard core Squeaker is thinking "this could be the opportunity I've been waiting for" ;-) 

-Laurence

>RTF is about the closest thing to a universally recognized rich text  
>format.  Virtually every word processor reads and writes it, and there  
>are libraries for most programming languages available.  Mac OS X uses  
>RTF as its primary rich text format - it's what's generated by  
>TextEdit, and Cocoa has an API for using it.
>
>It's very well documented, though I think that there are few complete  
>implementations. Format specification is here:
>
>http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ 
>dnrtfspec/html/rtfspec.asp
>
>-- Duane
>
>On Dec 16, 2003, at 9:04 AM, goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:
>
>> Ned Konz <ned at squeakland.org> wrote:
>>> For the second, someone has to write an RTF reader. Which would  
>>> require t=
>>> hat:
>>>    * the format be documented somewhere (being a Microsoft format,  
>>> I'm not=
>>> =20
>>> sure that it is)
>>
>> It is actually kinda well documented for being an MS format (just  
>> google
>> it). So it is not an impossible feat. But before embarking on it I  
>> would
>> personally check if there is some other format that gives more "bang  
>> for
>> the buck".
>>
>> regards, Göran
>>
>
>