RTF is a document formatting language developed by Microsoft. There are many word processing packages (Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, Frame Maker...) that can read or write RTF format files. rtftohtml was designed to translate existing RTF documents into HTML - the format of the World Wide Web. rtftohtml can also be used to author new documents specifically for the WWW.
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In the first version we discovered that RTF differs quite a bit depending on where you generate it. The biggest feature of rtftohtml 2.1 is that you can customize it to your own platform without mucking about in the code.
In 2.1, you can modify character set translations. Each input character set is mapped to a standard set of names, so that a curley bracket '{' maps to the same internal representation regardless of whether it came from the Mac, ANSI, PC or PCA input. On output, you can specify the sequence string of characters to be used for any of these characters. So we should be able to get the full set of HTML characters.
Also in 2.1, you can modify what styles are recognized and how they are translated to HTML. Again, this is done in an external file - so you can customize it to match your RTF producer.
Other features of 2.1 include:
Nested lists
Nested text styles <b><i>hi</i></b>
File naming conventions are much improved (and can be guided)
The rtftohtml translator was developed based on the RTF package version 1.09 developed by Paul Dubois. You will need the following distributions if you want to compile rtftohtml for your platform:
The filter will export graphics to separate files, but does not convert them to GIF or XBM format. If you have graphics in your RTF files, you may be interested in the PBMPLUS package of graphics filters. Included in this package is a translator for PICT graphics (bitmap PICT's only). The package is located here.
To get you started, I have a Style Sheet for Microsoft Word. This has definitions of the Paragraph styles that I use for authoring Web documents. It renders my RTF versions of the documents in a style that is close to what XMosaic 2.1 displayed (at one time.)