Word 2004 (11.5.2) -> rtf-Output wrong

[Thomas Kaltschmidt]

In Word 11.5.0 and even 11.5.2 the RTF-output on the Mac is wrong. The header
does no longer include the \mac keyword, instead it includes the \ansi
keyword.
So when i use High-Ascii characters in style-names for example (which is
very easy in non-US languages, in german we use umlauts like "ä", "ö", "ü"),
then export as RTF and import same file back in Word, the High-Ascii
characters in the names of the styles are wrong.
If i change the keyword \ansi into \mac in an text editor and import this
file, everything is ok.

Since RTF is very common format for file exchange, is there a chance this
will be fixed?

best regards
Thomas

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Thomas:

I am guessing that there is no chance of any change in Office 2008 now, they
are making the new version.

You can use Help>Send feedback to suggest that you want the change, but I
wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it

Is there a "Unicode" option in RTF? Internally the character set is
Unicode, not Mac.

Cheers

In Word 11.5.0 and even 11.5.2 the RTF-output on the Mac is wrong. The header
does no longer include the \mac keyword, instead it includes the \ansi
keyword.
So when i use High-Ascii characters in style-names for example (which is
very easy in non-US languages, in german we use umlauts like "ä", "ö", "ü"),
then export as RTF and import same file back in Word, the High-Ascii
characters in the names of the styles are wrong.
If i change the keyword \ansi into \mac in an text editor and import this
file, everything is ok.

Since RTF is very common format for file exchange, is there a chance this
will be fixed?

best regards
Thomas

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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Not a solution but simply additional info...

Is there a "Unicode" option in RTF? Internally the character set is
Unicode, not Mac.

In essence, the problem is that no options are offered when saving as
RTF - otherwise, maybe you could simply say which "character set" to use.

As far as I can tell from the RTF spec.
a. what is supposed to happen is that the characters in your document
are supposed to be emitted using the "ANSI code page" encoding that's
specified in the RTF header - e.g. when Mac Word emits, it currently uses

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg10000

which should in theory tell the reader that character codes should be
interpreted as Mac code page 10000 codes. (If other character sets are
used, they can be specified elsewhere in the RTF). Characters where that
is not possible should be emitted using the Unicode \unnnn encoding.
b. the spec says that
"However, all RTF documents must still declare a character set (that is,
\ansi, \mac, \pc, or \pca) to maintain backward compatibility with
earlier RTF readers."

which suggests that Microsoft now assumes that using \ansicpg10000
should be enough for modern versions of Word (probably 97 and later, or
2000 and later) to do the right thing when reading a .rtf file. But
maybe (a) that is not true, in which case Microsoft arguably needs to
fix the "reader" part of its rtf converter or (b) the characters being
rendered are not actually \ansicpg10000 and another code page should be
used when emitting the rtf. Or maybe no-one at Microsoft realises that
\mac still has significance.


Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk