Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: LO 3.4.3 Writer cannot handle RTF document

Hi :)
I think the best bet is to start a fresh document and copy&paste the contents of the old document 
into it and save as "Odt".  You will find that is radically smaller than you expect and gets rid of 
a lot of the kludgy mess of hidden code stored in the document.  

Once you have an Odt that you can edit as the original document you can then use "Save As .." to 
use formats that other people might prefer.  Odt is becoming very much more popular and usage has 
risen dramatically even in the last few weeks let alone the last year.  

Rtf is not plain text.  It was built by Microsoft as a proprietary format.  Although they kept 
claiming it was open for any other program to use they kept restricting access to upgrades for it 
until they had been able to incorporate those upgrades into their own programs.  Also when 
developing it they were not hugely interested in the needs of other programs and seemed to be 
pushing people into buying their product rather than being able to use other people#'s programs.  
The main MS format was Doc so Rtf never really got the attention it deserved as most of the 
development effort went into Doc instead.  MS are ceasing to develop it at all now and are likely 
to phase it out in order to push people into their new "Open" format, DocX which can only really be 
read by MS Office again as they again don't really stick to their alleged specs that are published 
for other people to use.  It is interesting to see that DocX created in MS Office 2010 doesn't 
always
 display properly in MS Office 2007 so people are forced into keeping on buying the newer products. 
 

Rtf doesn't contain all the private data and ancient revision history of a document in the way that 
Doc tends to.  However, it does still contain a lot of kludgy mess.  Just try opening it with a 
text-editor.   

Odt and other OpenDocument Formats, such as the spreadsheet one and the presentation one are 
developed by OASIS which is a conglomeration of many different companies including IBM, Google, 
TDF. Apache (previously Sun) and many others that want to be able to develop good products and 
exchange documents easily without relying on Microsoft's benevolence in allowing them to compete 
with a core profit-making product produced by MS.  

Regards from
Tom :)


--- On Mon, 7/11/11, prino <robert@prino.org> wrote:

> From: prino <robert@prino.org>
> Subject: [libreoffice-users] Re: LO 3.4.3 Writer cannot handle RTF document
> To: users@global.libreoffice.org
> Date: Monday, 7 November, 2011, 10:46
>
> Pedro wrote:
> > prino wrote:
> > > I would appreciate it if someone could have a look
> at to why this
> > > document doesn't display the way it should be
> displayed.
> > >
> >
> > Actually RTF must be the worse format in the world :)
> >
> > I opened your document under XP SP3 Pro x86 in 6
> different word processors
> > and it didn't look the same in any two: Wordpad,
> Abiword 2.9.0,
> > LibreOffice 3.4.4RC2, IBM Lotus Symphony 3, 
> Kingsoft Office 2012 and
> > Softmaker Office 2012.
> >
> > I would say that the only one where it looked complete
> and properly
> > formatted was in Softmaker, which isn't surprising :)
> >
> > If you are using LibreOffice I advise you to stick
> with ODF. If you need
> > to send files to people who don't use LibreOffice,
> then stick with doc
> > (not docx)
> If I need to send documents to others, I use plain text,
> where I might add
> some *bold* or _underscore_ "tags", but nothing more. Files
> are small and
> everyone can read plain text!
>
> Actually, other than the fact that LibreOffice cannot read
> (some) RTF
> correctly, its implementation of an RTF writer is absolute,
> excusez-le-mot,
> Sh*te, with a capital S!  It doesn't do any factoring
> of tags, and the
> documents it produces are humongous.
>
> An example? 
>
> I have a program that processes my, don't laugh, 
> hitchhiking data. (Yes, at
> the age of 51 I still hitchhike, see http://hitchwiki.org/community/prino/ )
> It optionally outputs the files in RTF format (it dates
> back to the early
> 1990'ies, i.e. well before OO & LO) All of the
> resulting RTF files contain
> the absolute minimum of tags and one has a size of just
> 299kb, a mere 26kb
> more than the plain text file.
>
> M$ Word was already bad, blowing it up to around 330kb, but
> LO Writer
> completely takes the piss by saving it as a 1.1Mb RTF file,
> and looking at
> it makes you wonder why Writer adds the same set of
> completely irrelevant
> tags over and over and over (and over and over ad nauseam)
> again. 
>
> As an aside, the fact that it's very easy to turn plain
> text into RTF using
> about any editor and/or simple scripts is a big advantage
> that RTF has over
> ODF, try making an ODT file on IBM's z/OS...
>
> Robert
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: 
> http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/LO-3-4-3-Writer-cannot-handle-RTF-document-tp3485447p3486607.html
> Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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