Re: Jade RTF and Winhelp

[Daniel Speck <dspeck@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Norman Walsh wrote:

> > The problem I hit is that the Jade RTF backend resolutely (and rightly,
> > I suppose) refuses to let you slide any '\' characters into the output
> > stream yourself, and as far as I know it doesn't have flow objects which
> > will generate the RTF codes Winhelp requires.
>
> Along these lines, has anyone developed a patch for Jade that
> will let one output an arbitrary hunk of RTF?  That would seem
> like one general approach to this problem (I have a couple of
> other things in mind, too).
>
> As I recall, there's a similar extension in the SGML back-end,
> though it's name escapes me at the moment.

It's the non-standard formatting-instruction flow object class. In my copy of
Jade I made the following modification (which was suggested by Vivek Agrawala)
to the RTF backend in the jade subdirectory:

*** RtfFOTBuilder.cxx   Fri Oct 17 16:23:04 1997
--- RtfFOTBuilder.cxx.orig      Mon Oct  6 17:02:24 1997
***************
*** 143,149 ****
    void startSimplePageSequenceHeaderFooter(unsigned);
    void endSimplePageSequenceHeaderFooter(unsigned);
    void endAllSimplePageSequenceHeaderFooter();
-   void formattingInstruction(const StringC&);
    void pageNumber();
    void startLink(const Address &);
    void endLink();
--- 143,148 ----
***************
*** 848,861 ****
      if (options[i] == systemCharset.execToDesc("95"))
        rtfVersion_ = word95;
    }
- }
-
- // Added based on meesage to DSSSL list
- void RtfFOTBuilder::formattingInstruction(const StringC &s) {
-   //  os() << s;
-     for (size_t i = 0; i < s.size(); i++) {
-       os() << char(s[i]);
-     }
  }

  void RtfFOTBuilder::initJIS()
--- 847,852 ----

I'm not a C++ programmer so sorry if this is inelegant.

With this modification, you can use the formatting-instruction flow object
class to output arbitrary strings to the RTF output file. Beware, however,
that a more sophisticated implementation is necessary if you want to, say,
output RTF footnotes in the middle of a paragraph. The current RTF backend
inserts a paragraph break if you have a paragraph embedded within a paragraph
which is what a multiparagraph footnote looks like to the backend as currently
implemented.

-dan

--
Daniel Speck                              e-mail: dspeck@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Research Engineer                          voice:     +1 301.548.7818
Thomson Technology Services Group            fax:     +1 301.527.4094
1375 Piccard Drive, Rockville, MD 20850      WWW:    www.thomtech.com

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