RTF Pocket Guide: The Universal Document Format

RTF Pocket Guide is a slim volumn, but its size belies the wealth of explanation it contains. Even a cursory reading will leave you with a much better understanding of something almost all programmers know a little about....(Parenthetically, I like topic-specific computer books, O'Reilly's Pocket Guides and Wrox's Handbooks).The book's stated intent is to offer an introduction to Rich Text Format, and is a valuable preface to Microsoft's Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification. It does a good job of that, offering both analysis and caveats.Now, if I don't offer a criticism or two this post will sound like it was done by the Marketing Department.1. I'd like to see the Perl code in the addendums translated into C# or VB. That probably would make it more accessible to more users.2. I wish the chapter on section breaks were fuller than it is. (Probably not a big deal for most programmers.)I'd strongly recommend this book for any programmer needing to work with RTF files.

RTF Pocket Guide is an extremely useful guide to RTF and makes for much better and faster reading than Microsoft's RTF specs. As the book itself points out, it is an introductory guide and does not discuss parsing RTF documents as well as it does creating them. It gave me the information I needed to create programs to write database data out as RTF and certainly does a great job of explaining syntax and constructs.As mentioned in other reviews, however, the editing for the July 2003 first edition is simply awful. A number of obvious errors exist in the initial sections. The overall content is so good that these errors are all the more glaring: How could an editor read the text and not catch them? If you treat these errors as opportunities to test your own growing knowledge of RTF syntax, they are actually kind of fun to find... but not what you would expect in a reference text. I have not found any obtuse errors; most are obvious as soon as you read them.Overall: well worth the money, but also an imperfect tool at best.

I agree with other reviews that point out ways that the publisher did not do this book justice: errors, lack of a reference command list.Nonetheless, reading a technical book this well written is a rare pleasure and a very efficient way to get the understanding and practical knowledge I was seeking. I am very glad to have this book.

Sean M Burke has written the RTF Pocket Guide, The RTF Cookbook and other technical materials on the Rich Text Format (RTF). These writings are worthwhile, and should be mandatory reading for anyone attempting to program RTF readers or writers.In my case, I needed to produce neat, printable reports from an Excel application written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). (It is not commonly known that many Visual Basic features are not supported in VBA, including the ones I required for my output.) After some research, I concluded that adding an RTF writer to my application would produce a quality product with limited additional programming.Microsoft's RTF Specification version 1.9 is NOT the place to learn RTF. It is very complete, but anything but a text book. Sean M Burke's writings brought me from the stage of RTF novice to an adequate programmer of complicated financial tables in short order. Thank you, Sean.Robert J Lambird

Good yet short intellectual read for those familiar with other document markup languages (e.g. LaTeX, HTML/CSS).

There was more introductory and expository material in the book than I would have expected for a pocket guide weighing in it only a scant 150 pages. In addition, the reference I would have expected, which would allow me to navigate an RTF exported from Word, I did not find.I recommend this to anyone who has some experience working with RTF and who wants to try to actually understand it. For those looking for an RTF decoder ring, you won't find it here.

Handy pocket guide that's been quite useful as I untangle and clean up some ugly RTFs.

This is a good basic reference. I bought it because I generally trust the O'Reilly series (I own several), but also because there is not much on-line about RTF that I considered reliable (always an alternative to a book, of course). I might have liked more examples, hence the four-star-not-five-star rating, but then it would no longer have been a pocket guide.

Ottima guida rtf.

The book explains RTF using well worked, non confusing examples. If you've struggled with the dense cryptic explanations in the Microsoft Specifications RTF specifications then this book will clarify them for you. It doesn't cover the most recent 1.9.1 specification, but the book will help you get a good grounding to work forward with. The author's done a good job.

A waste of money as you need a magnifying glass to actually read it.