Re: [OT] Create RTF with Emacs?

[Oliver Scholz]

kai@emptydomain.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Sorry for this off-topic post, but I was hoping that like-minded
> people would give better suggestions ;-)
>
> I'm part of a workflow based on MS Word documents.  Luckily, I get to
> create the MS Word document that should be processed by others.  I
> have a template.doc file that I copy and then fill in.
>
> So I was hoping that the recipients will be fine with an RTF file, or
> that I could use OpenOffice to convert *.rtf into *.doc.
>
> I guess for Emacs users the right approach is to use some kind of
> markup language.  Do you have some suggestions?
>
> The requirements for formatting are: the resulting RTF file should
> look very similar to the template MS Word document I've got.  The most
> difficult part of the layout is probably the table at the top.  Other
> that that, I will be fine with bold and italics and perhaps also
> indented paragraphs.  It would be nice if I could insert some text in
> another color, to provide annotations/remarks.
[...]

As I see it, RTF is the format invented by Microsoft for distribution
of files (it gives the impression of fitting MS Words internals very
well anyways, including the use of "twips" for measurement). Whereas
*.doc is just the format for local working copies. I won't say that MS
does not like to see that *.doc is used for distribution, but that is
how it is supposed to be. Unless your documents include VBA, RTF
should be fine.

For simple cases, writing *specialised* Elisp code for producing RTF
from a, say, Wiki-like markup language is rather easy. Could you be
more specific on what you need?

    Oliver
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