Why Build an RTF Parser?
Part 1 of a series of posts on the topic of building an RTF parser in Ruby. Some history and a review of various options for structured document formatting.
All Posts for This Blog (newest first)
Lists in Word and RTF
We will examine how lists work in Microsoft Word and RTF. Lists are like another kind of style mechanism operating in parallel with paragraph and character styles.
Lists Within Structured Documents
Lists are an indispensable part of most documents. We begin examining lists in: Word and RTF, HTML, InDesign, TEX and LaTEX.
Why Don’t All RTF Parsers Recognise Styles?
The RTF document format grew in parallel with Microsoft Word. Parsing and interpreting formatting controls when styles are mixed with direct formatting can be a challenge. Perhaps that’s why many RTF parsers ignore styles and their value as a structural device.
The Difference Between Document Structure and its Representation
Many text editing tools are so tightly connected to a particular file format that they are thought of as editors for that file format, rather than as editors of documents with abstract structure.
A Closer Look at Document Structuring
Documents received by document designers can and do contain many misuses of styles and direct formatting. This post examines the common cases.
Preparing Text for Publication is Different from Authoring — and Needs Special Tools
In this post I suggest that a publication designer needs a different kind of text preparation tool than the typical “word processor” used by authors.
A Conversation with Fredrik, a Document Engineer from the Netherlands
Fredrik from Utrecht in the Netherlands wrote to me in 2010 about publishing workflows. His experiences are similar to mine, so I quote from his email and add a commentary. We talked about the typical problems experienced with publishing workflows.
Scotty Interviews Me About Programming and RealBasic to MacRuby Translation
The MDN Show was a podcast about programming on the Macintosh. Circa 2010 I was interviewed by Scotty and presented a “case study” of a Structured Editor project that started in RealBasic and was subsequently ported to MacRuby circa 2009.
What’s Wrong with Word Processors and Why We Need Structured Editors
A major design defect of conventional word processors for preparing text for publication is that there are too many ways of implying structure.
About this Blog
Having spent many years using computers to prepare publications, it became obvious that the widely used word processors were less than ideal tools for preparing text for publication. As I thought more about this, ideas for a new kind of structured document editing tool came together in my mind. This project is an attempt to embody those ideas in a piece of software.