things lacking in Squeak

Cees de Groot cg at tric.nl
Wed Dec 17 18:33:35 UTC 2003


 <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. 

(and I think RTF would be most useful in Squeak)


-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.tric.nl     <cg at tric.nl>
tric, the new way           helpdesk/ticketing software, VoIP/CTI, 
                            web applications, custom development




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