While I don't have access to applelink, I thought it was interesting
that Apple is also trying to see a smart-text standard. Does anyone
know how good a fit this is with the RFC-XXXX richtext stuff?
Neil
---------------------------
contact:
Jackie Promes
Apple Computer, Inc.
(408) 974-3609
Apple Leads Industry-Wide Effort to Develop Rich Text Data
Interchange Standard
CUPERTINO, California--August 21, 1991--Apple Computer, Inc. today
announced that it is leading an industry-wide effort to develop a
new data standard that will raise the level of cross-platform text
interchange. This standard, called rich text (RTXT), will provide
software developers with a standard format to build directly into
their applications, which will allow fully-formatted text to be
transferred between applications, independent of the computer
platform used to create it. Many developers, including Aldus
Corporation, CE Software, Inc., Claris Corporation, Farallon
Computing, Inc., Frame Technology Corporation, Interleaf, Inc.,
Lotus Development Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Quark, Inc.,
Symantec Corporation, T/Maker Company, Ventura Software, Inc. and
WordPerfect Corporation are working with Apple to define the core
feature set of this standard, which will allow Macintosh, OS/2,
MS-DOS, Windows and UNIX operating systems to exchange rich text
data.
"The development of a rich text standard is an aggressive
move to meet the cross-platform needs of our developers and
customers," said Roger Heinen, vice president and general manager
of the Macintosh Software Architecture division. "Better
interoperability will benefit everyone, with styled, formatted
text moving between platforms."
Rich text objects are a sequence of text characters, together
with its inherent attributes, such as script, font, style and
size. The goal of this standard is to allow complete text
formatting and style of text information to be retained when
transferred between applications and platforms. This retained
information will include tab positions, rulers, line-breaks,
discretionary hyphenation, paragraph spacing, embedded objects
such as pictures and sounds, special text styles such as cross-out
and superscript, and Adobe Type 1 and TrueType fonts, all of which
define a group of attributes to be applied to a stream of text.
This RTXT standard will enhance the capabilities of the
Macintosh clipboard by increasing the number of attributes
transferred by the clipboard during copy/paste and
publish/subscribe operations. In addition, RTXT will also enable
electronic mail systems to transfer text with formatting and style
attributes between different platforms. As a result, the "lowest
common denominator" for electronic mail will be styled text
instead of plain ASCII text, the current data exchange format.
"We know that industry agreement on a standard for richer
text interchange will be a great benefit to software users, and
providing solutions that meet the needs of our customers is a top
priority for us," said Mike Maples, senior vice president of
applications at Microsoft. "Microsoft has joined these other
leading vendors to define a solution, evolving from existing
standards, that will make it easier for people to be more
productive with their computers."
Apple has already released the first draft of this RTXT
standard via Applelink, Apple's online information and
communication network, for developers to review. It will be
regularly updated in order to accommodate advances in desktop
publishing and word processing applications. RTXT is being
designed to be highly extensible to maintain backward and forward
compatibility throughout its evolution.
-30-
Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh and Applelink are registered
trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. TrueType is a trademark of
Apple Computer, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of Bell
Systems Laboratories.