rtf documents to the web for no-bureaucracy sharing

[Steven Avery]

Hi,

Ok, I am going to put aside all my feigned interest in CMS and web developments.

Today, I want to do stuff real easy, however there are so many ways to do it that I don't know what I want to do  .

I'm using Atlantis Word Processor for making documents.  It is light and real good for my purposes including smoothly taking multiple cut-and-pastes direct from the clipboard to a page with a lot of writing.  Also solid on taking the Greek fonts that come from certain Bible pages on the net  (e.g. a verse from Blue Letter Bible.) Also solid rtf as I use color and fonts for contrast. (I just would like its Paste Special -> Plain text to function better, right now I am doing that from my Eudora editor first.) If Abiword or anybody else has advantages over Atlantis, let me know, so far though I am quite happy.

I want to place the .rtf documents on the net shortly after they are made. (I would prefer not to convert them to PDF unless there is a compelling reason.)  I could cut and paste the document if that works, rather than upload, however that could easily clunkify.

Sometimes to be seen by a few friends, sometimes to place a link on a forum. They don't need fancy indexing initially. What I do later with such documents with CMS or ebook or other stuff is not the immediate issue.

I could use a simple web developer (Serif, etc).  And upload to a domain. Has certain advantages.  However, that leads to the intermediate step of how my document goes into the web developer.

Maybe a blog that does not have a blog feel but is more simply type and go.  Again, though, I want to prepare in my home word processor, not a blog editor.

Or I could use a special publishing tool like youblisher or whatever.  They seem to like PDF.

File sharing services are possible, but I think I want a tad more sophistication.

Your ideas, please.  I'm ready to roll, I did about five .rtf docs last week, sent them to friends and realized I like the method of using Atlantis as the editor.  And I don't at this time need fancy dancy, drawings, pics ... this is research text tech.

Nothing proprietary.  So I don't need complex permissions.

Share away!

Steven Avery


 

[40hz]

For simple publishing to the web I'd suggest using Markdown rather than RTF. Markdown is as easy as it gets.

There are a number of ultra-simple blog/CMSs (ex: Pico CMS, Anchor CMS, etc.) that use Markdown formatting. With most of these you just upload your file and it's done. Some of these use a flat-file system so no database is required.

For no-frills article composition (under Windows at least) I like WriteMonkey. It has support for Markdown built in. If you'd prefer an editor that has a realtime preview feature, take a look at MarkdownPad. Screenshot below:

rtf documents to the web for no-bureaucracy sharing

Don't know if this is the sort of input you're looking for but that's my on the topic.

[dr_andus]

How about pasting the contents of the RTF into a Google Doc and making it public? Haven't tried it myself but I'd imagine most of the formatting should be preserved.

[TaoPhoenix]

Sometimes to be seen by a few friends, sometimes to place a link on a forum. They don't need fancy indexing initially.

-Steven Avery (July 05, 2014, 09:41 PM)

Honing in on the word "fancy", maybe a simple index isn't so bad.

I have a free web service from Seraphim where I just use the panel to upload docs. So maybe you could just bang out something like a static page with web links like

Why DC Rules                  File 01
Baby Cody                      File 02
Mouser's Car                   File 03
Ren's Guide to Etiquette    File 04

---------------
Unused links

Title 5 File 05
Title 6 File 06
Title 7 File 07

And then people can both visit the index and click links (and do it in small batches, and tell them there's a few extra links at a time.)

Then the files just sit there and should have static filenames for the forum links for a long time.

[Steven Avery]

Thanks .. great ideas.

Yes, a simple index is definitely a help.

I'm a little skeptical of how well the Markdown / Writemonkey products will be in taking an existing RTF document, pictures adding even more difficulty, without lots of additional tweaking.  There was some discussion that this is not yet trivial. I like preparing in a simple whiz-kid WP like Atlantis, my goal is not to learn another environment.

I'm thinking of asking on some forums that specialize in creating .rtf and similar documents what they find best.  Possible venues - Atlantis, Jarte, Abiword and Libre/OpenOffice.

Apparently a key dichotomy is RTF-->HTML conversion (preferably native to the WP) vs. direct .RTF document upload. Seems like both might have a place.

Direct .rtf upload seems to be in the TaoPhoenix idea above (yay!) which I plan for review shortly. Maybe doable with any good web host? What happens when the reader hits the page?

Also I will test Google docs, maybe Zoho too.

[Curt]

I agree with you, Steven, that RTF is the more suitable format. However, my experience is that some RTF editors have features not supported by all RTF readers. But it is more important to be understood than to include fancy features, so I almost always use WordPad Write - because  it cannot write many features, but it can read most. So when other people are opening my RTF documents they will never answer that they couldn't read all of it (except of course if they don't have the relevant fonts). WordPad has changed its file name and location several times, on my Win 7 it is C:\Windows\System32\write.exe

[Steven Avery]

Hi,

Interesting.
I see WordPad looks ok on taking pics from clipboard

However, I am not using fancy stuff in Atlantis (e.g. bullets and tabs might be fancy?) Rather vanilla. Color, italics, bold, and size are the main tools.

I'm glad someone agrees that .rtf has some nice heads-down aspects.  Now, do I put an .rtf document up directly (and what would that entail?)

Or convert it to HTML? e.g. Abiword has some sort of direct output to HTML. Or a separate converter. However, will my embedded pics end up ok?

Steven

[Curt]

I know nothing about Atlantis or Abiword's abilities, but I do remember that Word 2003 gave excellent output, when biblical texts were uploaded directly via the Word's .DOC files. And because .RTF is much simpler, I trust you will be satisfied with your Atlantis publishing directly from Rich Text > HTML.

--------
by the way
http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/

[Steven Avery]

Hi,

Yes, Atlantis puts out HTML, it is a tad hidden (Save Special, Save as Web Page) and the page comes up right away with Total Commander as my viewer, surely Firefox as well. The HTML may not be elegant, but that does not matter in this case.

Next is to upload. Maybe later today.

Some of the editors like Abiword also input HTML, dunno exactly what that means yet on a practical level (is the output converted to RTF? or does it include tags?) and that may be superfluous for my needs.  I can see ongoing work in RTF, save as HTML, upload, as a consistent theme for many types of writings.

Steven

[Steven Avery]

Now for my next question.  What if I want that HTML page or RTF file to be embedded within a section of a blog or a CMS, rather than being a full separate page?