[TriLUG] More difficult than it should be

[Scott Chilcote]

On 08/01/2012 04:29 PM, Brian McCullough wrote:
> Folks,
>
> As usual, this is one of the places that many of us look when we have
> "interesting" questions.
>
>
> I have a "friend" ( well he is most of the time ) who has asked me to do
> a "mail merge" program on his web site.
>
> Ok, fine.  No big problem, right?
>
> Except that he wants to use RTF as the source of the mailing list, and
> Word Docs as the letter template.

Hi Brian,

I would try to discourage the use of RTF if possible, at least if your
friend has long term plans for this capability.  I say this from
personal experience.  I once wrote an RTF parser that scanned reports
pertaining to software bugs, and used it to insert records into the
division's bug tracking system database.  It worked great for several
months, then our IS department upgraded MS Word. 

The RTF that MS Word produced after that upgrade was totally different
(and about 5x bigger).  It amounted to having to rewrite the parser from
scratch.  They didn't just add new sequences, they revised most of the
existing ones.  M$ reserves the right to do whatever it wants to RTF,
and then does you the favor of updating the format documentation
afterwards.  It's not what most people in the open source community
would call a standard.

Just my $.02...

   Scott C.