[TriLUG] More difficult than it should be

[Brian McCullough]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2012 at 02:31:22PM -0400, Scott Chilcote wrote:
> 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. 

Thank you, Scott.  That's just the ammunition that I needed.  I don't,
on general principles, like the idea of using "wysiwyg" document formats
where you don't need to, or where they have no purpose, but I wasn't
really thinking of convincing arguments for an M$ user.


Brian