Re: RTF in conf files

The wiki is and has always been work in progress, and everybody is invited to improve upon it. David and I did the bulk of it at one point and used for such and similar aspects the code as we understood it and the mailing list together with the old documentation site as base .

We have been quite explicit about it. Including the fact that neither of us are programmers.

In that sense it is a bit upsetting and annoying to read you here , Jaak. You could have easily then pointed this out so that we either improved upon it or at the least commented upon our lack of clarity and any confusion or shortcomings in the code.

That all said, much of the coverage of all the filters has always been a moving target - if anyone asked with a good use case for improved or clarified coverage of whatever this has often been added. I certainly did a lot of that in the sword filters - making them comply better with OSIS, xhtml , rtf and whatever.

Ok, my moan is over. I suggest you make out of the list of your moans a list of bugs and then they might end up getting squashed one by one.

Sent from Outlook for iOS

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From: sword-devel <[email protected]> on behalf of Jaak Ristioja <jaak-89mTbI93R4uuvFJfX82//[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, April 26, 2024 2:12 AM
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [sword-devel] RTF in conf files

When I tried to write a similar parser some years ago (or rewrite the

libsword parser(s) in Sword++), I discovered to my dismay that the wiki

page is quite insufficient. The lack of a formal specification for the

configuration format leads to various serious ambiguities or questions

when wanting to write a parser. Some examples:

* How should different parsing errors be handled?

* What are the phases for parsing? Should the output of each phase be

a single string, or a list of strings parsed separately by next phases

(e.g. lines in case of continuations)?

* Should continuations be handled in a phase before or after parsing

RTF? How should "\\\\\n\n" be parsed?

* How to include a literal backslash? If escaped, in which phase of

parsing?

* Should official Microsoft RTF syntax rules be used for RTF control

word tokenization and semantics? Which version(s) of RTF exactly? The

rules on the Crosswire wiki page might differ from RTF specs.

* The wiki page states that "using the actual UTF-8 character is

preferred" to RTF "\u" escapes, but the RTF syntax only allows 7-bit

ASCII characters. Does this mean that all UTF-8 characters should be

converted to "\u"-style RTF escapes before handing off to the RTF

parser? Since the "\u" escapes can only handle code points U+0000 to

U+FFFF, how should other UTF-8 code points beyond U+FFFF be handled?

The original libsword implementation also seemed to suffer from various

issues and was not of much help to me, thus I eventually ended up

abandoning this effort.

J

On 16.04.24 10:20, domcox wrote:

>

> Only a very small, restricted subset of RTF markup is supported, see:

> https://wiki.crosswire.org/DevTools:conf_Files#RTF

>

>

> "David \"Judah's Shadow\" Blue" <[email protected]> writes:

>

>> I'm working on an info command to display some basic info about

>> modules, and I

>> ran into the fact that, at least in the About entry, the conf file can

>> contain

>> RTF formatting. As it stands I strip out \pard, replace \par with \n, and

>> strip out the tag portion of any anchor/link tags found. My question

>> is, are

>> there any other tags that are likely to appear in conf entries that I

>> should

>> be either handling or stripping (since my front end does no formatting

>> of text

>> whatsoever)?

>

>

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