Tight deadline! Please help with RTF export problems.

[macula]

I am having a hard time staying calm. Mellel is supposed to be able to export its native documents to the RTF format. I failed to notice any fine print in this proclamation, and I am very disappointed to see that such fine print is due.

Case in point: Please take a look at the attached Mellel file (a test document with gibberish for the purposes of style design), and compare it with the attached rtf file that Mellel exported. Much of the style formatting is lost (and this is a dissertation style set in which every detail matters):

Margins
Footers
Capitalizations
RTF contains added characters (e.g. notice the returns between the table and its legend).

What is going on?

[ozean]

I know that this can be really frustrating. But if you need consistent formatting while keeping the ability to edit the document (that is, if you rule out using PDFs), there is only one solution: all parties have to use the exact same software.

There has been a test with a relatively low-tech standard letter design in the biggest German IT publication recently, which found that the design did not transfer 100% correct even between different versions of the same program (MS Word). They tried conversions between MS Word 2003, 2007, and 2008 (for Mac), OpenOffice 3.x, AbiWord, Papyrus and one or two others that I forgot (they did not test Pages, sadly). It was a total disaster. Of course, compatibility of a .doc file between MS Word versions was better than compatibility of a .doc file between Word and OpenOffice, but still, it did not work 100% even in-between different versions of Word.

The sad state of affairs in contemporary word processing is that the only way to send the final product and be (pretty) sure that nothing breaks in a complex layout is to use PDF.

Nonetheless, there is a lot of room for improvement – especially with Mellel’s export/import with Word. (I guess when you talk about RTF, you talk about how Word interpretes it –because Word interprets RTF differently than for example TextEdit.) However, it is impossible to achieve full congruence – there are quite a few features that Mellel supports that are just not possible to do with Word (and the other way round).

[laup]

Adding to Ozean's comments:

I had a serious glitch with Word to Word compatibility. A "product" document looked fine in Word 2004. However, after someone opened it in Word 2003, all the endnotes changed from 1, 2,... to i, ii, iii, which looked bad because of the large number of endnotes. That was an embarrassment.

Returning to Mellel, as it happens, I did an experiment this weekend in which I imported a 200-page complex document into Mellel from Word, via rtf, and then exported it back to rtf and opened again in Word. There were remarkably few glitches. The ones I noticed were changes in some footnote and endnote character formats, and some figures that had been inserted in table cells seemingly disappearing. The former could be fixed easily using Word's find-and-replace feature. The latter took some manual time, but the figures were not lost; instead, I had to click around until finding them, and use the format menu to force them back to where I wanted them (in-line, inside table cells). Conclusion: compatibility is quite high, but some touch-up is often required (minutes or hours, not days). I find that it's more productive to talk about compatibility in times of time to check and fix than in % correctness. There are almost ALWAYS incompatibilities (e.g., between Keynote and PowerPoint, versions of Word, etc.)

[redlers]

I am having a hard time staying calm. Mellel is supposed to be able to export its native documents to the RTF format. I failed to notice any fine print in this proclamation, and I am very disappointed to see that such fine print is due.

Case in point: Please take a look at the attached Mellel file (a test document with gibberish for the purposes of style design), and compare it with the attached rtf file that Mellel exported. Much of the style formatting is lost (and this is a dissertation style set in which every detail matters):

Margins
Footers
Capitalizations
RTF contains added characters (e.g. notice the returns between the table and its legend).

What is going on?

I'm not sure what is going on, but glitches with margins and footers are frequent, as the interpretation of the same data here is different with different WP. If you can send the document to us, we may be able to detect this better.

[Sascha Erni]

Hi there,

I also want to mention the encoding problem Mellel RTFs face with certain word processors, mainly OpenOffice 3.x on Windows, but Linux has its issues, too. Mellel exports using \mac\ansicpg10000\ without escaping special chars – a code page OOorg hasn’t properly supported on Windows in two years (and still doesn’t with 3.2). It’s no problem if you hand in English stuff, it’s a huge problem as soon as you write in German, Icelandic or Old Norse. Special chars like äöü, ß, þ etc. simply aren’t recognised by OpenOffice. Nisus et al take the pains of converting the corresponding special characters in a document, hence it works.

Right now, I simply can’t use Mellel’s RTF export for my professional thingies as I often don’t have the foggiest what software the recipient will use to view it. Word 2003+? No problem. Mac? No problem. OOorg 2.x? No problem. OpenOffice 3.x, a software that is getting more and more wide-spread in Europe, especially universities and government places? No dice.

It’s not too cool to pre-emptively re-save all my documents in Nisus or NeoOffice just to make sure at least the Umlauts show up in place.

Cheers,
-Sascha

Edit:

ö in Nisus Writer RTF: \u246 \'9a
ö in Mellel RTF: \'9a

\u246 is the escaping sequence necessary if a word processor can’t deal with the code page. And it works without any problems even with Word 2000. That much can’t be said about Mellel’s RTF export which assumes that modern word processors support UTF-8 anyway. Well, in the case of OOorg 3.x, that’s not the case.rb

[centralasian]

Do the recipients not have a PDF reader? Do they need to edit the document? Admittedly there are export and compatibility glitches, but why not save/output to a PDF? No guessing there about what the recipient will use <Adobe Reader>.

[jannuss]

In addition to all the problems everyone else has mentioned, there are also font issues:
-- you use what you believe to be a standard font.
-- your correspondent appears to have the same font, but when he opens your file, it's unreadable.
Turns out that there are versions and levels of fonts as well.

I always send my correspondents two copies of a file: one rtf (if they want to make changes) and one pdf (so they can see what the document really looks like).

Janet

[Cattus Thraex]

I always send my correspondents two copies of a file: one rtf (if they want to make changes) and one pdf (so they can see what the document really looks like).

Janet

Good editors sometimes require both the .doc / .rtf file AND pdf file, just for this reason: so that they may check whether all is OK.

[Cattus Thraex]

I do understand your frustration, but please note that there is NO application in this world which may export/ import entirely perfectly. (You are the one who switches to Nisus, aren’t you?).
So said, if you have been using Mellel to create files, which look fine in Mellel, but poorly when exported, especially when you use special formatting, inserted images / drawings etc., I have to tell you that this is normal.
I know, this is not a solution for you. I shall try some ideas:
- if you need a presentation, export it as PDF
- if you need to send it to a scientific journal, send them both the rtf and PDF files, they will adjust it
- if you need to send a book for print, do it to the end, format the book from A to Z; I admit this is not really easy if this is your first attempt, but may be also o provocation.
Which is your case? One of these or another?