Import Full Formated Text

Michael Young myoung at ieee.org
Wed Nov 19 23:03:51 EST 2003


> >So, when you are creating an interactive project or whatever you are 
> >saying that most people have been content to just start from scratch 
> >with the text formatting?
> >I mean what do you have but Graphics, Movies, Sound and TEXT for 
> >importing into REV.
> >Graphic, Movies and Sound have importing capabilities.
> >Why not text? And why has that not been a high priority for most people?
> >	I just feel like I missing something if no one else sees this 
> >as a little bit important to an applications fundamental abilities, 
> >that's all. I don't think it should matter how big or small a 
> >company is but rather what they do and how they do it that matters.
> >
> >Ah, what do I know anyway.
> >Tom
> 
> Tom - perhaps if you set some simple guidelines for the content 
> writers so that they are able to produce documents in a form that are 
> immediately readable by Rev. Rev will import rtf and html files with 
> a reasonable amount of formatting intact. If on top of this you were 
> to import tables saved separately from the body of your documents as 
> tab-delimited files then you might be well on your way.
> 
> If however you have no control over the form in which documents are 
> delivered to you then you may have to edit them (a little or a lot) 
> before they are in a fit shape to be imported by Rev. This 'problem' 
> isn't peculiar to Rev by the way. Try opening a Word document in 
> PowerPoint and see what happens - I can guarantee you'll be 'amazed' 
> with the results!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Terry...
> 

Tom and others,

I have found this discussion interesting since I had a recent project
that I plugged the plug on because Rev word processing could not handle
it. While I appreciate the points Tom and others have made, I would like 
to reinforce, as others have done to some extent, that there are really
two issues here.

Issue one is Rev importing and exporting in various file formats. It is
completely and utterly unrealistic for the Rev makers to support every
text related file format. However, it not unrealistic to expect that a
few text based file formats should be fully supported. HTML/XML, RTF, 
and PDF would be good choices for relatively open standards. (I consider
PDF relatively open because there are many programs that create PDF and
even some that turn PDF into other things like PDF to Word
http://www.scansoft.com/pdfconverter/ . PDF appears to have long term
viablility.)

Issue two is Rev word processor capabilities. It is again completely
and utterly unrealistic for the Rev makers to develop a full word
processor to rival Word. It is not unrealistic to expect that some
limited word processing capabilities, which would need to be
determined, should be either readily accessible with Rev off the
shelf or easily programmable. After all the word processor is often
used as a standard beginner project for programming languages/packages.
Headers, footers, automatic page numbering, line justification, spell
checking etc. might be some of the expected word processor capabilities.
The question really becomes how much should Rev makers do for us vs.
how many hooks should they leave the developers to produce their own
word processors.

Both issues are important to me, but I am not sure they are important to
to the current Rev developer community at large if the responses to Tom
are any kind of sample.

Later,

Michael
myoung at ieee.org






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