things lacking in Squeak (RTF reader and writer)

Richard A. O'Keefe ok at cs.otago.ac.nz
Wed Dec 17 05:01:28 UTC 2003


	Yes. But it would be already great to read and write basic RTF
	
	- font selection
	- style selection (bold, italics, underlined)
	- font size
	- font color
	
	The specs for  this have been pretty much the same for the last 10 years.
	
And you'd be amazed at how bad RTF moved from one word processor to another
can look.

	SGML depends on a DTD, it may be relatively complex and SGML is not 
	widely used.
	
Depending on a DTD is not a problem.  In fact, it's _why_ SGML is useful.
James Clark's nsgmls and associated tools are now being maintained by the
OpenSP project; they are open source so there shouldn't be any problem
calling them from Squeak.  Jan Wielemaker's SGML parser (it's part of SWI
Prolog, but it's usable as a free-standing parser) isn't as featureful as
nsgmls, but it's faster.  It's also LGPL.  The real thing about SGML is
that the whole point of it is to describe structure, not presentation.
To combine presentation with SGML, you need DSSSL (another free program
from James Clark, maintained OpenJade project), which is an international
standard but just try to find a good book about it, or XSL (erk), or CSS.
CSS is not specific to HTML.

XML is a special case of SGML, and it _is_ widely used, not always as
a text format, although XHTML clearly is.

	MS has various products in various versions which deal with RTF as an 
	exchange format (even in the OS). They just cannot afford to become 
	incompatible with themselvelves...
	
Can't they?  I've known them do it.

	I agree. And it would be nice to have a little WordPad like editor in 
	Squeak. AFAIK the original Smalltalk system had something like that.
	
So does Squeak.  ParagraphEditor provides
    - font selection
    - style selection
    - font size
    - colour

It shouldn't be enormously difficult to provide a "Save as RTF" action
for edit windows.




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