Please don't drop RTF support!

[ryanknoll]

I've read where you are planning on dropping RTF support. I would like to vote to keep the RTF support. In my applications, I need to allow customers/users to download and edit publications for their own purposes (classroom purpose). Most other strong helps systems (I don't think I need to plug them here) support .doc or .rtf and it may hurt helpandmanual sales.

I know PDF is an option and you have great print capabilities, but please reconsider your apparent distaste for RTF. One help company enables users to import (or maybe it is export) into an .doc template, which may be easier than supporting RTF, I don't know.

[Chuck Hedge]

In our development environment, it has been a snap to send an updated RTF file over to the document producers to massage as required. It saves a lot of effort in producing the printed documentation.

The help system writer doesn't have to worry about any translation issues since the document writer manipulates the RTF file directly as required.

We need to have the additional export capability of RTF or DOC files.

Thank you.

[Olivier Beltrami]

We need to have the additional export capability of RTF or DOC files.

Please add my vote to this. I use it to extract chapters into MS-Word and then use machine translation (Systran 4, quite impressive) for some of my non-native English speakers. This cannot be done with PDF.

[Tim Green]

Add my vote too! It's going to be quite a long time before RTF stops being useful and/or essential.

I think I can guess what the background of this is, however: The current editor engine of H&M is basically WordPad, which Alex has turbocharged as far as is possible, but the limit of what is possible has now been reached. To provide things like CSS, dynamic styles, advanced table support etc. H&M 4 is going to have to have a new editor engine.

The original advantage of WordPad was its very robust RTF support, which was essential for a WinHelp authoring tool, since WinHelp source is based on the RTF format. I can imagine that including RTF in the list of capabilities that the new engine must have may limit the choices.

Even so, I would still like to vote for RTF support, it really is important.

[ryanknoll]

If H&M is using the WordPad engine, perhaps using a MUCH more power free, opensourced word processor to power the editing engine like AbiWord or OpenOffice would work great?

Both support opening/saving as RTF, DOC, XML, etc. I use both extensively.

A short term compromise may be to have Single HTML file export, so that can it can be opened it up in a word processor like MS Word and then save it into whatever format you want (.doc, etc.), and the Styles should be saved too.

[Ilkka Viinikanoja]

My vote here too. I occasionally have to produce Word-editable files of our documents, and losing the possibility to do that would make things much harder for us, and could even lead to having to switch to some other tool

[Derek Schauland]

Any chance that H&M might add support to allow Open Office Text documents to be imported in their native ODT format??

[Tim Green]

Hi Derek,

Any chance that H&M might add support to allow Open Office Text documents to be imported in their native ODT format??

At the moment we are following the development of the adoption of Microsoft "open" OOXML format and Open Document closely. We want to support import and possibly also export of an open XML-based document format in the future but implementing this is a major undertaking and we are not going to choose the format until the market has developed a little further.

Even though Microsoft has managed to get their format made "official" there is still much that speaks against it -- not least the specification, which is several thousand pages long -- and it is not yet entirely clear which format is going to become the general standard.

In brief, we do plan to start working on supporting the standard XML-based office files document format, as soon as it becomes more clear which format that is going to be.

[waldemar.hersacher]

Tim Green wrote:

In brief, we do plan to start working on supporting the standard XML-based office files document format, as soon as it becomes more clear which format that is going to be.

I'm already moved from Outlook to Thunderbird and now I'm on the way to switch from MS Word and MS Excel to Open Office.

Even in the company I'm working I see that a lot of my colleagues are having Open Office on the machines although MS is a standard installation.

[mmueller]

BTW, "open document" is a format recommended by many public administrations.

[Malcolm Jacobson]

I regularly transfer documents between my work machine (Office 2007) and my home machine (Open Office 3) and I've never had an issue opening Microsoft Word documents in Open Office - especially since they implemented the ability to open .docx files.

My vote would be to implement the same solution - provide the ability to open/import Microsoft files, but output to .odt (which is easy to convert to .doc). I would prefer either of these over .rtf.

Cheers,

Malcolm.