🚀 go-pugleaf

Catching up with news after Christmas, I find that....

John R. Burgoyne <burgoyne@eng.umd.edu> writes:
> Has anyone successfully created other than trivial .RTF
> files using something other than one of the Word family
> of word processors?

tom@mims-iris.waterloo.edu (Tom Haapanen) writes:
>
>Indeed, the RTF format is ASCII, but there it's RIDICULOUS to think of
>writing real help documents (100-200K) in RTF by hand!  Right now, I 
think
>WfW is the best bet.

Having spent loadsamoney on the SDK, and various other bits (like C 6.
0),
we (ie. the boss) rather objected to shelling out a lot more for a
word-processor that we wouldn't use for anything else but help files.

My approach was to write a small troff-like text processor which reads
ASCII files and produces an RTF file which HC will happily use. As well
as the help-specific items (context strings, keywords etc), enough
formatting commands are included to enable me to produce reasonable-
looking help screens. So far it supports everything except build tags
(including bitmap placement), and is proving quite a useful tool for
medium-size help systems.

In fact, it turns out that Word will also accept the RTF files produced,
which was a surprise to me - it seems that most of the junk at the
start of an RTF file is optional. Thus, if we do get a copy of WfW later,
I can port the files over.

Even though this was just a quick hack (1.5 days) to get my help files
written for our first exploratory Windows port, having tried a borrowed
copy of Word, I'm finding this approach much more comprehensible, and
worth developing.

julian
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Julian Templeman                           Baker Jardine & Associates
Tel: +44-81-371-5644                          London SW6 4TJ, England
Fax: +44-81-371-5182                            ...ukc!dircon!uad1031