Release Notes for WP2RTF
========================

April 1, 1992


I finally got fed up with manually translating WordPlus files into
various other word processors. I always lost the extended characters
in the translation; furthermore each line became a paragraph.

Then I came across a utility called 1WP2TEX (or something like that)
which had an elementary configuration file in which various
characteristics could be configured. Alas, my aim was to get the files
to a Macintosh word processor; and I could not get 1WP2TEX configured
to do that.
The reason for this is that the easiest way (in my opinion) of
converting texts is using an intermediate file format. There exists a
standardized exchange format (with layout info) called RTF - rich
text format - that suits all our needs.
However, the limits of the 1WP2TEX program did not allow for the RTF
header I needed. So I wrote a similar converter.

How does it work? Well, WP2RTF must the files to translate as
parameters. Furthermore, the first parameter can be '-t', in which
case the second parameter must be the name of a translation file.
The default translation file is called 'WP2RTF.X', which (as its
name suggests) handles translation to RTF. It may be easy to write
a translator for (La)TeX, I have not tried.

The format of a translation file is simple.
Each line starts with either a valid keyword or a character number
(in hex, preceded by '$'), followed by a separating character; the
rest of the line is assigned to the character (keyword).

Valid keywords are:

init0	the initialization strings 0..9
  .
  .
init9

exit		termination string
paragraph	paragraph separator
bold		bold command
underlined	underlined command
italic	italic command
light	light command
super	superscript command
sub		subscript command 
off		disable last style command
footnote	start of footnote command
endnote	end of footnote command


Enjoy, J. Scheerder

email:	Jeroen.Scheerder@phil.ruu.nl