[cvsnt] Problems with text/binary *.rtf files

[Thomas Muller]

|  On 9/25/06, Thomas Muller <ttm at online.no> wrote:
|  > |  > I have some problems with *.rtf files - when I add them as
|  > |  text they
|  > |  > become corrupt - MS Word fails to read the files. If I try
|  > |  to force them
|  > |  > into CVS as binary (-kb), they are still showing up as
|  > |  encoding 'text' and
|  > |  > MS Word still can't read them.
|  
|  What do you mean by "force them into cvs"?

I mean check-in with format set to binary. This used to work fine for rtf
files, but not anymore. 

|  > |  rtf files are text files, not binary files.
|  >
|  > I know (hence my statement below "insert as text (which 
|  rtf in fact is)"),
|  
|  I'm not quite sure about this. TortoiseCVS added '*.rtf' to its
|  default list of binary file extensions quite some time ago when
|  somebody argued it's not really plain-text "compatible".
|  I thought it could use non-DOS linebreaks which got screwed 
|  when checking out.
|  Then I read this in msdn:
|  
|  "A carriage return (character value 13) or linefeed (character value
|  10) will be treated as a \par control if the character is preceded by
|  a backslash. You must include the backslash; otherwise, RTF ignores
|  the control word. (You may also want to insert a
|  carriage-return/linefeed pair without backslashes at least every 255
|  characters for better text transmission over communication lines.)"
|  
|  I was about to scrap my reply when I then read this:
|  
|  "Unicode RTF
|  
|  Word 2000 is a Unicode-enabled application. Text is handled using the
|  16-bit Unicode character encoding scheme. Expressing this text in RTF
|  requires a new mechanism, because until this release (version 1.6),
|  RTF has only handled 7-bit characters directly and 8-bit characters
|  encoded as hexadecimal. The Unicode mechanism described here can be
|  applied to any RTF destination or body text."
|  
|  Are you sure Word isn't saving the file with 16-bit chars (UTF-16,
|  UCS-2, whatever).

No idea, mate, - I've never read the RTF spec. Nevertheless; doesn't CVS
have a switch for unicode formatted documents? Do you think this will do the
trick? Will CVS then be able to perform variable expansion as mentioned in
previous posting?

--

Thomas