rich text in Squeak

Todd Blanchard tblanchard at mac.com
Fri Jan 2 04:10:55 UTC 2004


On Dec 31, 2003, at 11:39 AM, Tim Rowledge wrote:

> The folks at Acorn took a very different approach
> to Apple; they concluded (correctly) that they were going to have to
> live in a heterogenous world and so made their system friendly to
> almost all others. Apple took the view that only their stuff was 'real'
> and made it very difficult to work with other platforms. I suppose that
> has improved a bit with OSX recently.

It has - quite a lot.  The use of rtf as the rich text format and the 
fact that the system text editor widget understands how to read and 
write it makes it a relatively ubiquitous format on OS X.  Furthermore, 
this is a huge interop plus as MSWord on both Macs and Windows treat 
rtf files as more or less first class citizens.  IOW, when asked for a 
Word file, I just send rtf that I've edited with TextEdit and nobody 
seems to notice.

> I'd say it is an interesting lesson to us; _if_ we want to be able to
> work with other systems _then_ we need to creat importer and exporter
> capabilities. Of course, that may not be what we want in life. YMMV.

Well, Squeak purports to be a multimedia platform.  RTF is a pretty 
common media type.

-Todd Blanchard




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