.RTF incompatibilities (was: Dataviz and xyW)

[Peter Evans peterev@xxxxxxxx]

>Client after client kept telling me that they
>could not read my RTF files, so now I grind my teeth and go through Word
>(v.6) to send them either Word-generated RTF or .doc files.

My typical Word-using acquaintance doesn't even understand the concept of
...RTF files. His or her Word is set up to look for the presence of one or
more .DOC files. Take the option of looking for *.*? "Ooh, that sounds
very difficult. I'm sure that's easy for you, Mr Evans, but you know so
much about computers!"

When *I* open a Xy/Word-for-Word-produced .RTF file with (Japanese) Word
97, Word spends a long time managing even to display it on screen. A very
long time. A very, very, very long time. How so? Well, Word thinks that
the pages are infinitesimally small (or perhaps that the margins are
immensely big, I forget), and thus there's a page break after each character.

I've never dared do this with a longish file. A very short one can of
course easily run to five thousand or more pages. Word does a commendable
job with the first one or two thousand, but after that it slows down. I go
out and have lunch, come back, take the menu option of selecting the whole
file, and change the dimensions for the selected area (the whole thing).
Word chugs through the file, reformatting it, and the result is pretty good.

What's to blame? Word? I'd like to think so, but I doubt it. For when I
feed Xy/W4W files to WordPerfect 8 (US), I forget what happens--either
WPerf gives up with an error message, or it crashes--but it's hopeless,
even worse than with Word. (OK, OK, perhaps both Microsoft and Corel
messed up a Microsoft "standard", and Microlytics got it right.)

I've recently downloaded newer conversion modules from the amazing
Hungarian ftp site; sorry, I don't remember if I've used these for RTF. I
may be describing the result of Word for Word as it was distributed with
XyWin.

(Also, I haven't experimented with going from Xy to Word via WordPerfect,
etc etc. I know I should, but life's too short and for me the difficulty
of conversion is just another handy excuse not to use Word.)



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Peter Evans