Ted, an easy rich text processor
Ted is a text processor running under X Windows on Unix/Linux systems. Ted was developed as a standard easy word processor, having the role of Wordpad on MS-Windows. Since then, Ted has evolved to a real word processor that still has the same easy appearance as the original. The possibility to type a letter, a note or a report on a Unix/Linux machine is clearly missing. Only too often, you have to turn to MS-Windows machine to write a letter or a document. Ted was made to make it possible to edit rich text documents on Unix/Linux in a wysiwyg way. RTF files from Ted are fully compatible with MS-Word. Additionally, Ted also is an RTF to PostScript and an RTF to Acrobat PDF converter.
Compatibility with popular MS-Windows applications played an important role in the design of Ted. Every document produced by Ted fully compatible with MS-Word without any loss of formatting or information. Compatibility in the other direction is more difficult to achieve. Ted supports many of the formatting features of the Microsoft applications. Other formatting instructions and meta information are ignored.1 By ignoring unsupported formatting Ted tries to get the complete text of a document on screen or to the printer. Ted can be used to read formatted e-mail sent from a Windows machine to Unix, to print an RTF document, or to convert it to Acrobat PDF format.
Wysiwyg rich text editing. You can use all fonts for which you have an .afm file and that are available as an X11 font. Ted is delivered with .afm files for the Adobe fonts that are available on Motif systems and in all postscript printers: Times, Helvetica, Courier and Symbol. Other fonts can be added with the normal X11 procedure. Font properties like bold and italic are supported; so is underlining and are subscripts and superscripts.
Ted uses Microsoft RTF as its native file format. Microsoft Word and Wordpad can read files produced by Ted. Usually Ted can read .rtf files from Microsoft Word and Wordpad. As Ted does not support all features of Word, some formatting information might be lost.
In line bitmap and windows metafile pictures.
PostScript printing of the document and its illustrations. Saved PostScript files contain pdfmarks that are converted to hyperlinks when they are converted to Acrobat PDF.
Spelling checking in twelve Latin languages.
Directly mailing documents from Ted. Mail in HTML format is a multipart message that contains all images hyperlinks and footnotes.
Cut/Copy/Paste, also with other applications.
Find/Replace.
Ruler: Paragraph indentation, Indentation of first line, Tabs. Copy/Paste Ruler.
Page breaks.
Page headers and footers. Page numbers in page headers and page footers.
Tables: Insert Table, Row, Column. Changing the column width of tables with their ruler.
Symbols and accented characters are fully supported.
Hyperlinks and bookmarks.
Footnotes and endnotes.
Colored backgrounds and table borders.
Saving a document in HTML format.
Probably the best illustration of what you can do with Ted is its documentation that has been made with Ted.
No undo, can bearly use seriously
Extremely limited table support.
When saving my .rft to .txt, all the table layout are lost
Ted /usr/local/Ted/TedDocument-en_US.rtf &
An RTF translation package that includes several tools for translating RTF into other formats. The utilities in the package include:
rtf2text, from RTF to plain text;
rtf2troff, from RTF to troff;
rtfwc, translates RTF into character, word and paragraph count;
rtfdiag, a diagnostic program used to test the RTF reader;
rtfskel, a translator skeleton used for building new translators; and
trfindent, for reading an RTF file and translating it into more readable form.
The package is documented via man pages. http://www.primate.wisc.edu/software/RTF/
wv (formerly known as MSWordView) is a library that understands the Microsoft Word 2000, 97, 95 and 6 file formats and is able to convert Word documents into HTML, which can then be read with a browser. It also allows other programs access to word documents for the purpose of converting them to other formats and is currently being used by Abiword as its word importer.
wv compiles and works under most operating systems. Although most development is carried out with Linux, wv should work on BSD, Solaris, OS/2, AIX, OSF1, and even (with varying levels of success) AmigaOS VMS. The GnuWin32 project maintains a port for Windows, and it is required to compile and work on all of AbiWord's supported platforms.
Provided with the wv distribution is an application called wvWare. wvWare is a "power-user" application with lots of command-line options, doo-dads, bells, and whistles. Less interesting, but more convenient, are the helper scripts that use wvWare. These are:
wvHtml: convert your Word document into HTML4.0
wvLatex: convert your Word document into visually (pretty) correct LaTeX
wvCleanLatex: convert into 'cleaner' LaTeX containing less visual mark-up, more suitable for further use and LyX import. Work in progress
wvDVI: converts word to DVI. Requires 'latex'
wvPS: converts word to PostScript. Requires 'dvips'
wvPDF: converts word to Adobe PDF. Requires 'distill' from Adobe [Someone do a pdflatex or pdfhtml version :-)]
wvText: converts word to plain text. Textually correct output requires 'lynx.' For poor output, this doesn't require anything special.
wvAbw: converts word to Abiword format. (Far better just to use Abiword.)
wvWml: converts word to WML for viewing on portable devices like WebPhones and Palm Pilots.
wvRtf: a basic version exists
wvMime: can be plugged as a MIME helper application into your browser/mail client; presents the document on-screen inside GhostView, while all intermediate files generated go into the /tmp directory.
Antiword is a free MS-Word reader for Linux, BeOS and RISC OS. It converts the documents from Word 6, 7, 97 and 2000 to text and Postscript. Antiword tries to keep the layout of the document intact.
antiword-0.33-1.i386.rpm
version 0.31 (08 Dec 2000) (size 170145 bytes)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 13:29:54 -0500
> What I want is a small, fast *viewer*. And maybe a *simple filter* > that outputs either plain text or PostScript.
A few minutes browsing on Google ("rtf viewer linux") lead me to the SuperLinux Encyclopedia page on file viewers <URL:http://slencyclopedia.berlios.de/editors.html>, which mentions catdoc, which, after a bit of redirect chasing, I found here <URL:http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/ice/catdoc/>. Catdoc's page has a nice section on "competing" products, and it looks like either it or one of the other programs mention would fit your requirements.
Ed Blackman
> > Catdoc does not seem to do anything with RTF files other than deal with > > character code weirdnesses. At least with the few RTF files I have > > laying around. > > Go and get rtfreader. Works pretty much ok here.
I managed to download an old version of catdoc — the catdoc download page has a slightly confusing layout. When I downloaded the *current* version I got a version that properly deal with RTF files…
Robert Heller
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 15:36:26 +0000
> Is it possible to copy text from a web page and paste it into an Open > Office document (preferably text document) and have the document show > the text as opposed to the html source code?
I just highlight the text in Mozilla, press Ctrl+C, switch to OO, then do Edit, Paste Special, Unformatted Text.
Garry Knight
> I just discovered Paste Special in the windows version. It pastes HTML > jsut like M$ Word does... when you paste it looks like you are looking > at the Web Page. However, in the Linux version (1.0.2) Paste > Special->HTML pastes the source code. > > Any idea how to display the pasted HTML source properly?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Do you mean you want to copy from Mozilla into OO and have it display the way it does in Mozilla, i.e. with all the clickable links visible as links, and so on? In other words, to convert the pasted HTML source into interpreted HTML?
If so, I don't know of a way. I tried doing New, HTML Document and pasting into that, but it pasted the raw HTML code. And Paste Special gives four options:
OpenOffice.org Writer Formatted text (RTF) HTML (HyperText Markup Language) Unformatted text
It looks like the 3rd one should do the job, but it doesn't. Even if you paste it into a Writer document then save it as HTML, it converts '<p>' into '<P><p></P>'.
You could try asking on the OO user's mailing list or the OO forum. http://openoffice.org/mail_list.html http://www.ooforum.org
Garry Knight
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.setup
> > Is there any free software that allows you to read *.doc files in Linux? > >StarOffice & WordPerfect 8 ( you have to register it first which is also >for free)
For something console-based, try word2x, if you just want to read them rather than edit them; it makes a fairly good stab at converting Word 6 files to text or LaTeX, and won't be completely lost with later versions either. It's GPLed, and distributed with Debian, or get the source from:
can't build, under RH6.2 or Soalris 2.5.
wv converts doc files into HTML - search for it at http://freshmeat.net
Robie.