[kabdib]

Mwahaha. Kiddie stuff. Go try and read RTF some time. Try to convert it to HTML. Try to figure out how to extract tables. Oh, bugger.

The best I can say about that experience is (a) I learned a lot about how legacy file formats grow, especially when they are supposed to be "open" but are really treated as proprietary ground for developers to stomp all over in metal-soled booties, and (b) the company that paid me to do that work is long, long out of business. The misery is long past.

[aruggirello]

> The misery is long past.

With legacy apps, your miserable past is usually somebody else's nightmarish present...

I had a funny - though unrelated - experience with RTF production a couple decades ago. To make things more interesting, we were using KnowledgeWare ObjectView for the job - a 16-bit RAD tool with a custom simil-VisualBasic syntax, and collecting data from a UNIVAC 1100. I moved to a different company about four years later, and later discovered ObjectView... oops, just ceased to exist. Phewwww!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KnowledgeWare

[spdustin]

I wrote an XSLT transformation for SharePoint that emitted an RTF doc that included tables a long while ago. Damn, I write a lot of that in anger. Another one for DocBook to RTF, for another client. Also written in anger. RTF is painful to try and reproduce rationally.