RTFViewer is a program that will display documents stored in Microsoft's 
Rich Text Format (RTF), and it is usable on the common computer systems 
including Macintosh, Motif/XWindows and MS-Windows.   This may be the 
first freely available RTF viewing program for some of these platforms.

RTF documents can include a variety of fonts including symbols, font 
sizes and styles, super-scripting and sub-scripting, tabbing, paragraph 
formatting, and pictures (in both vector and bitmap forms).  Executables 
of the program are available via gopher or ftp at ftp.bio.indiana.edu: 
/util/dclap/apps/rtfviewer.

It is built on a cross-platform C toolkit from the Nat'l Center for 
Biotechnology Information (NCBI), especially Jonathan Kans' Vibrant user 
interface toolkit. This was combined with Paul Dubois' excellent RTF 
parsing routines.   On top of this toolkit, the author built a C++ 
application framework that is patterned after the MacApp framework from 
Apple Computer. This framework is available freely to the public, as is 
NCBI's toolkit and Paul Dubois RTF parser.  The home archive location 
for DCLAP is {ftp,gopher} to ftp.bio.indiana.edu:/util/dclap.

This initial release of RTFViewer lacks important features, and also it 
includes several bugs.  There are application executables for Macintosh, 
MS-Windows, and Sun Sparcstation, with a Silicon Graphics version 
expected soon.  Source code is available, at the DCLAP home, to those 
who wish to compile it on their own systems.

Comments, bug reports and suggestions for new features may be addressed 
via e-mail to    dclap@Bio.Indiana.Edu

History
June 1994, v 0.1.  first release to public, along with GopherPup v 0.2 
that supports network RTF.

This release of RTFViewer includes the core
of RTF processing (fonts,styles,font-sizes,center/right/left just,
paragraphing,tabbing).  It lacks various RTF features, esp. tables
formats (but tabbing can substitute).  It currently includes
picture support for Macintosh PICT format only (various MSWindows image
formats are defined also for RTF), but that format allows
documents to show both vector and pixmap pictures.

There are some various bugs and drawbacks to this library --
it is still young.  Among the more important here is that printing
is not defined for X-Window systems...