CoreText & Cocoa Text - what is RTF?

[build 42] Cello will open some simple files with text, The question "what is RTF" seems suddenly quite poignant. The reading of a file with text fails because the reading of the RTF (within the file) fails. Cocoa believes the RTF to be bad and throws up it's hands in horror. Cross checking my results with TextEdit (I added some code to squirt out the RTF on its own in a file) yields the same result.


My assumption was that Cello's RTF could be read by the Cocoa RTF reader. Lawrence Harris (one of the most notable and helpful contributors to Apple's Carbon Dev mailing list) frequently points out the fallacy of relying on assumptions. The relevant RTF snippet is happily gobbled up by MSWord so it can't be all that bad, but my assumption was.

I spent some time thinking of the best way to deal with this. My feeling is that I need to be able to read files from the PC version to be able to do any kind of testing, my approach relies on working through files created on the PC version. My solution is to take Cello's RTF reader out of the "bad-list" and to use it as a fall-back for reading RTF.

Getting the RTF import to work was not a huge amount of work- probably the biggest surprise was the discovery that all text sizes in cello are represented in 10ths of a pt. Other than this I compiled out the inbuilt RTF export - this is currently not required and getting it to compile will just take time.