RTF Pocket Guide

Rating:
Summary: Actually an intro to RTF - and with mistakes
Review: I was really looking forward to this book as I have been fighting the rtf spec for over a year.

First off, this is not a reference like the other Pocket References from O'Reilly. It is a basic intro to rtf (and in all fairness it does say that in the begining of the book).

But even as in intro, it covers very little. For example, nothing about lists (ie bulleted or numbered paragraphs). So it's very very basic.

Second, it's wrong in places. The biggest mistake I saw was that it says you cannot embed jpeg or png files in a rtf file. You can and it's well documented in the Microsoft spec.

In short, if you know nothing about rtf, this is an ok start. But that's about it.

- dave

The author has asked me to add the following - which I do agree with: "The biggest mistake I saw is that it missed a simple way to embed jpg's and png's in documents, and instead suggested complicated workarounds."

Rating:
Summary: necessary preface to MS RTF Specs
Review: RTF Pocket Guide is a slim volumn, but its size belies the wealth of explanation it contains. Even a cursory reading will leave you with a much better understanding of something almost all programmers know a little about.

...

(Parenthetically, I like topic-specific computer books, O'Reilly's Pocket Guides and Wrox's Handbooks).

The book's stated intent is to offer an introduction to Rich Text Format, and is a valuable preface to Microsoft's Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification. It does a good job of that, offering both analysis and caveats.

Now, if I don't offer a criticism or two this post will sound like it was done by the Marketing Department.
1. I'd like to see the Perl code in the addendums translated into C# or VB. That probably would make it more accessible to more users.
2. I wish the chapter on section breaks were fuller than it is. (Probably not a big deal for most programmers.)

I'd strongly recommend this book for any programmer needing to work with RTF files.

Rating:
Summary: Terse introduction, no reference material
Review: There was more introductory and expository material in the book than I would have expected for a pocket guide weighing in it only a scant 150 pages. In addition, the reference I would have expected, which would allow me to navigate an RTF exported from Word, I did not find.

I recommend this to anyone who has some experience working with RTF and who wants to try to actually understand it. For those looking for an RTF decoder ring, you won't find it here.

Rating:
Summary: Little Gem
Review: This little gem saved me a lot of time and hassle. RTF is notoriously under-documented and your only option (AFAIK), until now, was to wade through a dense and cryptic 150+ page spec. I needed to generate word processor files from DB data and I wanted to avoid the messy XML, XSLT, FO, Gee-Whizz-ML overkill at all costs. This guide enabled me to knock up a working program in just a few hours. Yes, the book has some omissions, but you cannot condense the RTF spec into a pocket guide.

Unfortunately the author has been let down by poor copy editing. There are some non-trivial errors such as "The syntax for a font table is {colortbl...", and there are quite a few woolly sentences here and there. But that's par for the course with cutbacks at publishing houses these days.

Overall, if you need generate WP docs from an app, this little guide is worth it's weight in gold.