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Message-ID: <19980123140052.49550@lemis.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 14:00:52 +1030
From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To: Jay Nelson <jdn@acp.qiv.com>
Cc: FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject: Re: How do I read RTF ("Rich Text Format")?
References: <19980123132310.09667@lemis.com> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980122211429.1647A-100000@acp.qiv.com>
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In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980122211429.1647A-100000@acp.qiv.com>; from Jay Nelson on Thu, Jan 22, 1998 at 09:21:17PM -0600
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On Thu, Jan 22, 1998 at 09:21:17PM -0600, Jay Nelson wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Jan 1998, Greg Lehey wrote:
>
>> Somebody has just sent me a document in RTF, and I can't do much with
>> it.  Does anybody know of software which can decipher this stuff?
>
> StarOffice can read all but the latest versions. 

Hmm.  I tried this, and got a typical Microsoft-world message, one
that I can't even copy and paste (grrr):

Errir opening document file: General Error. General input/output
error.

file(1) says:

Rich Text Format data, version 1, ANSI

> Andrew has some rtf tools that works better than most.

I suppose I should try this.

> There is also some rtf2??? tools out there that supposedly convert
> to LaTeX and HTML. I looked at them some time ago and the porting
> pain outweighed the benifit.

I can understand the concern.  I'm wondering too.

> M$ recently "enhanced" RTF so I doubt anything will handle rtf out of
> '95. If there's not too much, you can tr the carriage returns to line
> feeds and edit most of the markup out. _Most_ rtf files are plain text
> with markup. (Except for CR instead of LF.)

I think I need to format this document.  I've asked the sender to
resend it in something portable.

Thanks for the reply
Greg