>Actually Squeak does have "transparent handling of richly formatted
>text".
I should have been more specific, the conversation here has been in the context of widely recognized formats. The only widely recognized format which Squeak currently supports at all is HTML and that support is neither transparent or complete yet. This is not a gripe, but it is IMO a reasonable statement of the present situation.

>
>Before talking about this, let me reiterate Bijan's statement: please be
>careful of your tone. 
> First, Squeak is *not* about cloning MS Windows. 
>It is more accurate to say that Squeak is about making a *better*
>operating system than what is out there. 
Perhaps, but since 1981, I've been convinced that "An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." :-)

> If your interests are in a
>free OS on *par* with current OS's, then go check out Gnome and/or KDE
>-- they are doing quite well along these lines.
It seems as though I touched upon a sensitive point for you and Bijan though I had no intent to. That said, what you've read into my "tone" seems a bit of a stretch, especially since you weren't aware of how widely used RTF is and has been outside of MS cirles. My objectives, which others in the Squeak community share, is to be able to exchange richly formatted text documents with people who aren't using Squeak. This is a basic communications task most people have to carry out. The ability to do it in the Squeak environment, the time one is out of the Squeak environment. One can write memos, proposals, reports etc. which others can read without doing anything special. It also means that Squeak programmers and scripters can provide solutions which process existing text resources and/or output in a recognized format. This can be used as a vehicle for demonstrating the practical advantages of Squeak. These things may not matter for you(which is perfectly fine) but others see some value in them.  

>
>Second, Squeak is open source.  Discussion is welcome, but it is all
>*suggestions*.  It is extremely rude to tell someone else what they
>should volunteer to do.  Do it yourself, if you truly think something is
>imperative.
After rereading my post, I don't see where I said explicitly said any of the things you're objecting to. I had no intent to be rude and if you can say specifically what I actually said that you feel was rude, I'll gladly take it into consideration in the future and apologize if it is apparent that my comments were inappropriate. 
>
>
>That aside, here are some things to consider regarding your goal of
>seeing better rich text in Squeak:
>
>	1. RTF cannot be imported in general from outside sources, despite some
>people's expectations.  That defeats the main way that RTF support would
>be useful in Squeak.  We've already gotten a taste of this situation
>with trying to support HTML.
As has been mentioned, there are some bad implementations, but I've been using RTF to exchange documents between Mac and Windows for a long time.
>
>	2. Squeak could emit RTF, and it shouldn't take much coding.  This has
>some limited use, I guess, but for how long are Squeak users going to be
>happy writing just rich text within Squeak? 
Please accept my being repetitious, but in the interest of clarity the value of RTF awareness in Squeak is in interacting with people who aren't using Squeak. Projects, .morph files etc. provide Squeakers with plenty of ways to exchange rich media including text. 

> How long until they make a
>hyperlink or embed a morph?  Is RTF output even worth the clutter of
>adding one more menu item somewhere?  IMHO, for output, it would be more
>helpful to focus on the PS emitter.  That thing produces truly lovely
>output when except when it does things that are stunningly horrible.  :)
Most people using computers don't have an easily accessible means to view PS.

Cheers,
Laurence