Composing Styled Text for RR Apps

[Dan Shafer]

OK, so I get this. RR has three types of "styled" text field 
properties: styledText, RTFText, and HTMLText. They are not quite 
compatible or equivalent to one another.

I am creating a stack which is content-rich and which demands 
attractive-looking formatted text as a key element of its design. While 
neither RTFText nor HTMLText supports anything resembling a robust 
subset of their "real world" counterparts, it appears I must choose one 
or the other of them for my work.

The question is: what is the best way to compose and prepare text for 
display in RR using either RTF or HTML formatting? Since the RTF subset 
that RR supports is relatively small and seems not to be properly 
implemented yet in the current 2.0 beta at least, using something like 
OpenOffice to compose it in RTF would be a potential problem, 
particularly because in that case, the RTF formatting is invisible to 
me. So I won't know if I've done some formatting that RR doesn't 
support or not until I bring the material into RR and look at it. Very 
inefficient.

HTMLText, OTOH, is visible but it supports a really, really tiny subset 
of HTML.

I see that the RR developer/documentation team use a LOT of styled text 
in online help. Surely they don't hand-code this stuff as they prepare 
it, which means either that they've solved the tool problem or have 
figured out how to use external composers to get the desired effects.

Anyone else out there struggling with this issue? What's the best way 
to attack it?