Our email medium here at Profox, otoh, is plain text. It appear fine
in a browser, an email client, even emacs!
For some definition of "fine" and some definition of "plain text".
All email is encoded in some fashion.
If you use a device or a service that inserts UTF-8 or some other
double-byte encoding, or HTML-like punctuation escape codes, into the
email, then you don't get "plain text" when you try to read the message.
And complaints about this get the response, "You should use a modern email
program", while suggestions that the sender should use a
plain-text-compliant email program are chuckled over and deemed "quaint",
or perhaps some other less amusing term.
I am surprised to learn that RTF is a Microsoft proprietary format. It is
an "open" format, and that's probably what confused me.
My encryption system can generate results that contain "unprintable" (in
the technical sense, not referring to the kinds of words I sometimes use in
response to relentless and mindless technological churn) characters that
reside at the low end of the ASCII table. I use it to create encrypted
authorization codes for separate modules in my application. I distribute
the codes to users in a file that my software reads, since users can't type
them. I quickly learned that I can't put those characters into a "plain
text" file and have them come back out correctly, nor would they work in a
.doc file. I did find that I can parse them correctly out of an RTF file
FILETOSTR-ed, and my parsing code handles a couple of different RTF
"standards", so that's what I use for that.
The RTF I posted to my website was created using the version of WordPad
that comes with Win XP.
I don't know anyone who can't still pretty easily read an RTF file,
including people using OpenOffice on a Linux box. Unlike PDF, it is
accessible to blind people using screen readers. (No, Adobe's
"accessibility" features don't always work, and most people don't know how
to correctly OCR text being scanned into a PDF, and they get actively
irritated when asked to learn). To my mind, therefore, RTF is a better
universal standard for formatted text than PDF, and certainly far better
than .doc (which most people don't know how, or can't be bothered (see
"irritated", above), to generate from their .docx-default versions of Office).
However I do see that the RTF generated by FRX2Any is readable in Word 2010
but not in the Wordpad that comes with Windows 7.
I live in a 90 year old craftsman bungalow, ride a 28-year-old steel
bicycle and wear geeky computer clothes from the 90s. I have nothing
against quaint. Just noting it in passing.
I knew a highly-skilled and experienced computer programmer who lived
full-time in a cabin whose only electricity was supplied by a single light
socket dangling from his bedroom ceiling. There was no internet access.
There was no cable, and no TV to consume it. There was, in fact, not even a
POTS phone. In all other respects, the room resembled Van Gogh's bedroom,
except it wasn't as colorful. He refused to look at a computer except his
workplace. Some people like to control where their complexities and
simplicities are encountered.
Ken Dibble
www.stic-cil.org
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