FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

• Graphics and rtftohtml
  • HiJaaK Pro
  • Graphic Workshop
  • GIFConverter 2.3.7
  • GraphicConverter 2.0.2
  • JPEGView 3.3
  • Paint Shop Pro
  • Clip2GIF
• Character Sets and Translation
  • 1. Introduction
  • Error Conditions and Remedies
    • First Things First - Determine the character set.
    • Error: Invalid Character Code \´xx - outputting &#ooo;
    • Error: No output translation for :bullet
  • What to do when you want to change a character translation

Graphics and rtftohtml

rtftohtml will generate a separate file for each picture found in your RTF source. The type of the picture file depends on how it was added to the RTF. If your word processor runs on Microsoft Windows, you will probably get a WMF (Windows Metafile Format) graphic. If your word processor runs on a Macintosh, you will get a PICT file. Since neither WMF nor PICT graphics are supported formats on the WWW, you will want to convert these files to GIF format. The following programs will convert to GIF format.

HiJaaK Pro

Hijaak Pro is made by
Inset Systems, 71 Commerce Drive, Brookfield CT 06804-3405, Phone
203-740-2400, Fax 203-775-5634 They also have a toll free number
800-374-6738 (800 DR INSET). They have a BBS, 203-740-0063 and are on
CompuServe (GO INSET).
The program runs under Microsoft Windows and says it can

• View, edit, and image-process a file
• Convert a file from one format to another (over 70 formats)
• Capture a screen
• Print an image
• Organize your graphics files

Graphic Workshop

The Graphic Workshop is a shareware program ($40) for MS Windows. It
can be found at ftp://uunorth.north.net/pub/alchemy/gwswin11.zip It looks
really nice. It can convert a lot of graphic formats including .wmf.

GIFConverter 2.3.7

Kevin A. Mitchell <74017.2573@compuserve.com>
Kevin A. Mitchell
P.O. Box 803066
Chicago, IL 60680-3066 USA
License: Shareware ($40 + shipping)
GIFConverter, by Kevin A. Mitchell, reads and writes the following graphics file formats: GIF, MacPaint, PICT,
RIFF, RLE, Thunderscan, Startup Screen, TIFF and JPEG (with or without QuickTime). In addition, it writes EPSF
files. Also provided are image enhancement, cropping, color table selection, and dithering features.

GraphicConverter 2.0.2

Thorsten Lemke <thorsten_lemke@pe2.escape.de>
Thorsten Lemke
Insterburger Str. 6
31228 Peine
Germany
License: Shareware ($35)
GraphicConverter, by Thorsten Lemke, imports PICT, Startup-Screen, MacPaint, TIFF (uncompressed, packbits,
CCITT3/4 and lzw), RIFF, PICS, 8BIM, 8BPS/PSD, JPEG/JFIF, GIF, PCX/SCR, GEM-IMG/-XIMG, BMP (RLE
compressed BMPÇs also), ICO/ICN, PIC (16 bit), FLI/FLC, TGA, MSP, PIC (PC Paint), SCX (ColoRIX), SHP,
WPG, PBM/PGM/PPM, CGM (only binary), SUN (uncompressed), RLE, XBM, PM, IFF/LBM, PAC, Degas,
TINY, NeoChrome, PIC (ATARI), SPU/SPC, GEM-Metafile, Animated NeoChrome, Imagic, ImageLab/Print
Technic, HP-GL/2, FITS, SGI, DL, XWD, WMF, Scitex-CT, DCX and KONTRON.
GraphicConverter exports PICT, Startup-Screen, MacPaint, TIFF (uncompressed, packbits and lzw), GIF, PCX,
GEM-IMG/-XIMG, BMP, IFF/LBM, TGA, PSD, JPEG/JFIF, HP-GL/2, EPSF, Movie (QuickTime), SUN, PICS,
PICT in Resource and PBM/PGM/PPM.

JPEGView 3.3

Aaron Giles <giles@med.cornell.edu>
Aaron Giles
182 E. 95th Street 11E
New York, NY 10128 USA
License: Freeware (Send a Postcard)
Master Site: ftp://ftp.med.cornell.edu/pub/jpegview
JPEGView, by Aaron Giles, is a flexible image utility designed to allow quick, high-quality viewing of the most
common image formats, including JPEG, JFIF, GIF, PICT, Baseline and LZW-compressed TIFF, Windows BMP,
StartupScreen, and MacPaint.
JPEGView can also convert between QuickTime JPEG and JFIF-standard JPEG files.
Version 3.0 added a number of substantial new features, including full AppleScript support, new high-quality
dithering routines, a greatly improved slide show, floating windows, etc.
JPEGView is now distributed only as a "fat binary", i.e. a program containing both 68K and Power PC code, thereby
enabling it to run flat-out on both normal Macintoshes and the new Power Macintoshes.

Paint Shop Pro

It is shareware.
I found it on CI$

Clip2GIF

Clip2GIF is a great tool that integrates well with RTFtoHTML. In the preferences for rtftohtml, change the creator for image files to that of Clip2Gif. Then set Clip2Gif preferences to do conversion automatically (instead of displaying.) Now when you convert, you will see Clip2Gif files appear in your directory. Just double clicking on them will create the gif files that you need.

The following information was taken from the Clip2Gif homepage at http://iawww.epfl.ch/Staff/Yves.Piguet/clip2gifhome/default.htmlhttp://iawww.epfl.ch/staff/Yves.Piguet/clip2gif-home/clip2gif.html
clip2gif is a freeware utility for the Macintosh to convert PICT, GIF, TIFF and JPEG images to any of these formats, written by Yves Piguet. The current version, 0.7.2 (317 K) (cf. release notes), can be obtained at the following places (and all other good info-mac archives):
clip2gif's main features are

• Display of PICT, GIF, TIFF and JPEG files
• GIF output
  • transparency
  • interlacing
  • depth of 1, 2, 4 or 8 bits/pixel
  • gray shades output
  TIFF output
  • bilevel, grayscale, palette-color or RGB
  • Packbits compression when useful
  JPEG output (requires QuickTime)
• Pict output
• scaling
• input from PICT, GIF, TIFF or JPEG files or the clipboard
• simple drawings with AppleScript
• comprehensive on-line help

Character Sets and Translation

1. Introduction

Text characters in an RTF file may be specified as literal characters or using \'xx notation, where xx is the hex value of the character. RTF files also contain a control word that specifies the character set that's used within the document and governs the interpretation of character values. The charset control words are:

\ansi	ANSI (default) - Used by Word for Windows
\mac	Apple Macintosh
\pc	IBM PC
\pca	IBM PC page 850, used by IBM Personal System/2

Although the four charsets don't appear to differ for characters in the ASCII range (below 128), they differ considerably above the ASCII range (128-255). For example, the ANSI, Macintosh, and PC charsets represent the degree sign ("¡") as \'b0, \'a1, and \'f8 respectively. Furthermore, even for a given charset, character values in the Symbol font represent different characters than they do generally. For example "a" in Symbol font is the greek letter alpha.
rtftohtml uses a translation model that divides translation into two parts. When the RTF file is read each character is mapped to an standard character name. This mapping is controlled by the files:

General and symbol charset maps are stored in the text files ansi-gen, ansi-sym, mac-gen, mac-sym, pc-gen, pc-sym, pca-gen, and pca-sym. Each line of a charset file associates an RTF character value (field 2) with the standard character name to which the RTF character corresponds (field 1). Here's a sample from ansi-gen:

parenleft	(
parenright	)
space		" "
quotedbl	'"'
quoteright	"'"
quoteleft	"´"
a		a
b		b
c		c
bullet		0x95
emdash		0x96
endash		0x97

Character values may be given as a single character (in which case the ASCII value is used), or as a hex number 0xyy. Single or double quotes may be used to quote values containing whitespace or quotes (e.g., use single quotes to quote a double-quote).
Lines with a "#" in column one are taken as comments. Comments and blank lines are ignored.
When the HTML file is written, each standard character name is mapped to an ascii string. This mapping is controlled by the file html-map. The format of this file is
(i) field 1 is the standard character name, just as in the charset maps;
(ii) field 2 is the output sequence to produce for the character named in field 1
Lines with a "#" in column one are taken as comments. Comments and blank lines are ignored.
Here's part of the html-map file:

a		a
b		b
c		c
ampersand	&
less		<
equal		=
greater		>
trademark	(TM)
AE		Æ
Aacute		Á
Acircumflex	Â

Error Conditions and Remedies

First Things First - Determine the character set.

1. Identify which character set you are using by looking at the top of the RTF file. You should see one of the character sets identifiers, either \ansi, \mac, \pc, or\pca . If you do not see any of these then \ansi is your character set.

Error: Invalid Character Code \´xx - outputting &#ooo;

If you get this error, that means that a character appeared in the RTF input that has no standard character name. You fix this by adding that code (in this case the Hex Code xx) to your input character mapping file. Which file you use depends on your character set:

\ansi	ansi-gen and ansi-sym
\pc	pc-gen and pc-sym
\mac	mac-gen and mac-sym
\pca	pca-gen and pca-sym

1) Detemine what character set you are using as described above.
2) find the character code in your source and determine what it looks like when it is displayed by your word processor. Also check to see if it is a character in the symbol font.
3) Add \'e4 to the input translation file:
If you are using ansi and the character code is in the symbol font then you should edit ansi-sym and add:

somename        0xe4

The name that you use depends on what e4 looks like on your screen. If it is a bullet, then use

bullet          0xe4

This tells the filter to treat this character code as a bullet.
The complete list of standard character names is here:

Error: No output translation for :bullet

If you get this error, this means that the filter has no output mapping for the standard character name "bullet". To fix this, edit the html-map file and add a line
describing what to output for a bullet. For example:

bullet	*

What to do when you want to change a character translation

Start with html-map. Find the standard character name that you want to have translated, and then edit the corresponding string.