> <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org> said:
>>They are very different in many ways, but ultimately each provides a
>>widely recognized means of describing the formatting and storage of rich
>>text. Since both can be used to engineer solutions to the same problem,
>>apples and bananas or onions and garlic.might fit. 
>>
>Sure, I can use horsecarts and USV's to transport freight... 
>
>PDF is an output format. It's pixel-precise, tells you exactly what
>fonts to use, how big everything must be, where on the page it should
>be, etcetera.
>
>RTF is an authoring/exchange format. It has more 'semantic' markup:
>'this is a heading', 'this should be bold', 'run this header on every
>even page'. You could probably specify full page layout with RTF, but
>that would defeat the purpose - the idea of RTF is to transport as much
>useful information from one app to the other, which mandates a maximum
>amount of high-level (semantic) information in the markup, freely
>interpretable by the other end. 
>
>I don't really see how, in general, both formats could solve the same
>class of problems. 
In general they aren't used for the same things, but either could be used to address two of the specific problems we're talking about here - the ability to read and write to a widely recognized rich text format.


>(and I think RTF would be most useful in Squeak)
I agree.
-Laurence
>
>
>-- 
>Cees de Groot               http://www.tric.nl     <cg at tric.nl>
>tric, the new way           helpdesk/ticketing software, VoIP/CTI, 
>                            web applications, custom development
>
>