Notes on the RTF replacement files and rtf2rtf.
Steve Tynor (tynor@atlanta.twr.com) December 1995.

I'm not proud of this code. It's a hack foisted upon a hack, nested
within another hack or two.  It sort of works well enough for my
purposes (generating WinHelp .RTF files for my documents), but it
could definitely use a redesign/rewrite. It started as a simple
pertubation of the html2html filter, but got ugly very quickly...

I shamelessly blame the RTF format for most of the hackery here -- RTF
is not a _language_ like LaTeX or ROFF -- it's just a file format. So,
we can't rely on RTF to do even simple things like "insert a paragraph
break here only if the previous token was not also a paragraph
break. Since the SGML front end has no conditional processing
capabilities, multiple blank likes in the SGML get translated to
multiple para breaks in the RTF. That's why we use a "lex" filter
(rtf2rtf) to postprocess the raw RTF generated by the mapping files.

Again: I offer this to the Linuxdoc community with the hopes that it
will be useful to others and that someone else can help flesh out the
missing pieces. What? Missing pieces?  Yes, recall that I say it works
"well enough for my purposes".  The replacement files (general,
mapping) started out like as the latex replacement files.  Much of
them still _are_ the latex replacement files.  I only converted those
parts that are actually used by my documents. Your documents may
require more of the files to be translated to RTF.

Since I'm using these mappings for actual documentation, I plan on
maintaining this backend, so please send me any improvements -- I'll
coordinate with Greg to make sure they get into the the next official
release.



 
