topic Re: Convert to RTF format in Operating System - Linux

Convert to RTF format

Marie-France Paquet — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:36:06 GMT

Hello,

I need to convert ascii 'tab delimited' files into RTF format. Does anyone know how to do it ? Is there a converting command or script that could help me ?

Thanks a lot.

Re: Convert to RTF format

James R. Ferguson — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:41:35 GMT

Hi:

Perl's CPAN repository hosts some modules for dealing with RTF. One such is:

http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/RTF-Writer-1.11/lib/RTF/Writer.pod

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Convert to RTF format

Marie-France Paquet — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:08:43 GMT

Thank you for your help, but I went to that CPAN site and unfortunately it seems a lot complicated for my needs. Actually, I have about 50 (or more) Unix scripts that create ascii tab delimited files to be used after in mergings with Word 2003. Since Word 2003 doesn't recognize our file format, we were told by Microsoft support to convert our files into RTF format in order to have them recognized by Word 2003. I was expecting to find a 'one line command' that I could insert in my scripts to translate my files '.txt' into an '.rtf' file (something like a trux2rtf ??). But it doesn't seem to exist. Does it ?

mfp

Re: Convert to RTF format

Court Campbell — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:19:27 GMT

can you post some sample output, or attach a sample file. it seems odd that Word would have trouble opening the file. I almost wonder if you just need to run unix2dos on the file first.

Re: Convert to RTF format

Steven Schweda — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:43:23 GMT

I like the unix2dos theory, too.

> can you post some sample output, or attach
> a sample file.

Or, perhaps, use MS Word to create a suitable
file, save it in RTF, and look at that to see
how the professionals do it. Or, save it as
plain text, and look at that. The real
question is what the required file format is.
RTF may be only a guess by someone who has no
idea. MS Word should be able to read plain
text just fine, if it can see where the lines
end.

> Word 2003 doesn't recognize our file format

What does that mean, exactly? What is in the
file, and what, exactly, does MS Word do/say
(when you do what, exactly)?

Re: Convert to RTF format

Sandman! — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:06:38 GMT

Since it's tab delimited; run it first thru expand(1) and then thru ux2dos(1) before opening the file in Word. expand(1) will convert the stops into blanks, if that's what you want else simply running it thru ux2dos(1) should be enough.

~hope it helps

Re: Convert to RTF format

Marie-France Paquet — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 07:54:21 GMT

Hi everyone,

I am sorry for the delay. I answered yesterday a long explaining message with a example file attached but it seems that it didn't go throw. Here I am again this morning with my explanations.

The problem we have is that our files contain french characters (with accents) and those characters are interpreted as japanese characters by Word 2003 ! So we get errors when executing our macro files. Word is expecting an answer to specify the language used in the file. If I don't find a way to convert my files to RTF, we'll have to modify every macro files all over the place. Those macro files were used for a long time without any errors until we upgraded to Word 2003.

Here is an example of a file.

Re: Convert to RTF format

Court Campbell — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:03:29 GMT

I was able to open your file with wordpad and then save it as rtf. then I opened it with word 2003. You may try that.

Re: Convert to RTF format

Marie-France Paquet — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:07:46 GMT

Yes, that's what we are working on. We are going to modify the macro files to add a few steps before doing the merge (such as opening the file and saving it in RTF). We would have prefered to avoid modifying them but since there is no way out, we are going to do it.

Thanks a lot everyone.

Have a nice day !

Re: Convert to RTF format

Court Campbell — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:19:09 GMT

I am not sure what your macros are doing, but I have the feeling you could write a perl script to produce the same output.

Re: Convert to RTF format

Marie-France Paquet — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:29:41 GMT

Unfortunately, I am not familiar with Perl. So, the solution is going to be done in Word. Thanks for your help. I am closing this call.

mfp

Re: Convert to RTF format

MZ_1 — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:55:52 GMT

Maybe you can hack on this to get what you need. it was written to take a .out file and converts it to .rtf , then emails it to the user. It does not work well if there is special formatting already in the doc such as bold. Not pretty, but it works.