QuillRTF - A Review
By Timothy Swenson
While checking out new QL web pages, I ran across a utility
written by Pedro Reino of Spain. The program, called
QuillRTF, converts Quill files to Rich Text Format (RTF)
files. RTF was an early format created to share formatted
documents between different word processors. RTF does a fair
job of keeping the formatting information of a document, such
as boldface, underlining, pararaphs, and so on.
I have used plain ASCII text to convert Quill documents to
Microsoft Word. Once the document is in Word I would have to
clean the document up and rejoin all of the paragraphs from
single lines. Using RTF would save me hours of reformatting.
I downloaded Pedro's program and unzipped it. Giving that
Pedro is from Spain, the program and the documentation is in
Spanish. My Spanish is limited to ordering off a take-out
menu, so I could not read the documentation. But, not
reading the documentation has not stopped me before.
I executed the program and was preseted with a Spanish Menu.
One menu item "Fichero" was highlighted. Maybe it meant
"files"? I hit the return key. A submenu came up, also with
a menu item highlighted (Convierte). I hit the return key.
The program read FLP1_ and now a directory of files on FLP1_
displayed. Ah, now I should be able to select a file to
convert. I used the arrow keys to move down until I had
highlighted an example _doc file. I hit the return key. Now
the program started reading the file, printing out a byte
count as it went along. After a minute or so, the program
stopped and I was back to the submenu. Guessing it was done,
I hit the ESC key until I had exited the program. I now did
a directory of FLP1_ and found a file with the same name as
the _doc file I selected, but it had an _RTF extension.
I copied this file to an MS-DOS disk, sneaker netted it over
to my PC, and read the file into Word (telling Word it was an
RTF file). Now I had my document, nicely formatted, in
Microsoft Word. Ah, another successfull attempt at blunding
my way through a program.
If you are doing any conversion of Quill documents to other
word processors and they can handle RTF files, then Pedro's
QuillRTF program is just what you need. It's not the fastest
program, but the minute it takes to covert the file saves at
least 10-15 minutes of reformatting. I figure it takes me
about 15-30 seconds to reformat an average paragraph, so any
document over a single page would be faster to use QuillRTF
than to do it by hand.
As for what else the program can do, I have not a clue. But,
if you can read Spanish, mabye you can find out.
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