Re: hyperRTF?

Barry Books <bfb@bonnell.com>

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Date: Thu, 23 Jun 1994 20:27:35 +0200
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From: Barry Books <bfb@bonnell.com>
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Subject: Re: hyperRTF?
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I've seen a lot of mail about RTF (some of it duplicates :-) ) but I
haven't seen anybody mention Acrobat. Acrobat is Adobe Systems cross
platform document interchage format based on Postscript. RTF is nice
in that editors are readily avaiable and its fairly easy to implitment
but it also leaves many problems unsolved. The three main ones being:
What happens if the machine displaying the text does not have the
fonts used in the document? RTF has very little support for graphics
and finally Acrobat compresses its data which make better use of low
bandwidth lines. Its problems are currently it's only avaiable from
Adobe (It's fairly cheap but it's not free) and it doesn't support
URL's although it does have some form of hypertext. I think if you are
interested in doing real cross platform formating of documents and
wish to have a high degree of certenty that the documents will be
display exactly the same in all cases you should base the standard
on some form of page description language like Postscript.

disclainer: I don't work nor have I ever worked for Adobe or Microsoft
but I do recieve documents in both formats. RTF is nice because I can
load it into my editor and change it, Postscript usually produces
better looking documents because it supports graphics and color.

Barry Books
Mount Bonnell Inc.
bfb@bonnell.com
http://www.bonnell.com/bfb/