RTF export with structure?

[ike]

Hi!

By now Scrivener exports RTF without the structure, that means "Part" or "Chapter" are made by changing the font and the size. But RTF can do more. In RTF you can define that an area is a chapter or a part.

Would it be possible to add this?

Michael

[KB]

Hi,

I'm not quite sure what you mean - could you explain in more detail? The exporters just use the basic Apple export methods. Apple's support of RTF is a lot more basic than Microsoft's (with it being a Microsoft file format, I guess). For instance, on Windows, RTF supports images and tables. On a Mac, RTF doesn't support these things - only RTFD. Of course, certain programs on a Mac will open Windows RTF files correctly, but most won't - the images or tables get lost. I fear that the kind of structure you are talking about may also not be supported by default in the same way. To support this sort of thing would mean me getting my hands dirty with RTF - writing my own exporters. And this wouldn't be an immediate priority. At some point down the line I would love to support the exporting of files to .doc and .rtf in such a way that they don't lose graphics, for example, but right now that would mean weeks of research and weeks of coding, when the basic export will do for most users and there is so much more I need to do.

I guess what I am saying is, maybe I will consider it for 2.0. Though more information would be appreciated, as I am not aware of the kind of structure you are talking about in RTF.

Thanks,
Keith

[ike]

Hi!

admin said:

I'm not quite sure what you mean - could you explain in more detail? The exporters just use the basic Apple export methods.

Then I guess that my wishes aren't possible. When you write a header in a text processor you normally shouldn't simply enlarge the font or something like this. You should define a format for that. And this information (about the different format types) can be encapsulated into RTF.

Apple's support of RTF is a lot more basic than Microsoft's (with it being a Microsoft file format, I guess).

Microsoft, Apple and IBM, as far as I know.

To support this sort of thing would mean me getting my hands dirty with RTF - writing my own exporters. And this wouldn't be an immediate priority.

Okay. That is understandable.

So I hope that in the near future there will be an export format that support structures (XML?). I hope that the upcoming HTML export will be XHTML and will take use of elements like h1 to h6 and so on. I want to use the export for LaTeX and if it was XML or XHTML I could write it on my own.

Michael

[janra]

I'm not sure if this is helpful at all, but I have used an RTF export on mac system 7.5 that would create RTF images without any problem. So it's been done before - and I'd hope the capability hasn't been lost!

I'm pretty sure it used the old claris extension system (I don't think it required claris to be installed, just the extensions). There's got to be a library somewhere that you can call.

(I used this for exporting text + sketches from my apple newton - the sketches showed up as images in RTF. It did a great job in placing them relative to the text, too, since I had them mixed quite thoroughly in a few spots...)

-j

[KB]

Thanks for suggestions.

LaTeX support is something I want to look into in the future - though that will be after 1.0 is released, as I have never used LaTex myself, being a straight word processor user, so wouldn't presume to try to write exporters without learning more about it.

As for images in RTF... Yes, it has been done, but notably, even such great OS X word processors as Mellel don't support it. To clarify my earlier comments, although RTF may be used on Windows, Mac, IBM, whatever, it was actually developed by Microsoft. It is a the rich text standard, and credit where it's due - Microsoft did a decent job with RTF. What seems to have happened, though, is that where Microsoft continued to develop RTF so that images can be embedded into it, Apple took RTF as the basis for their own package-style format, RTFD (rich text format directory), which contains RTF and other files - such as images - inside a UNIX directory.

Thus, Apple make it *very* easy for developers to save text with images in RTFD format. But they don't support images in RTF. That is, _by default_. This means that as a developer, in my code I can do something like this:

myExportedRTFDFile = [someText RTFDFromRange:allText];

And I have an RTFD file with images and everything, all in one line of code. But the RTF equivalent:

myExportedRTFFile = [someText RTFFromRange:allText];

would create an RTF file with no image, etc.

That is the code as provided by Apple. Those exporters that _do_ support images, etc, have obviously been custom written. This means that instead of using one line of code, I would have to go away and write hundreds of lines (probably) - after spending a long time researching the RTF format itself. So, as you can see, this is not a high priority - especially when users can export to RTFD and open it up in Mellel. The only bummer is, you can't open RTFD files in Word yet...

Cheers,
Keith

[janra]

Right, because windows sees an RTFD as a directory, with a TXT.rtf file inside. (I wrote a bit on my NaNo on a windows computer, and I had to open my previous day's writing to see where I left off, and that's what I found.)

I don't think Windows supports "seeing" a directory as a file at all. They seem to be going the opposite way, and showing files as directories (.zip files, for example, which are actually a file but you can browse as if they were a directory). So I don't really hold much hope for them ever supporting RTFD or any directory seen as a file. After all, it's Apple that supports MS formats, not the other way around :-p

-j