RTF Pocket Guide
by Sean M. Burke

This errata page lists errors outstanding in the most recent printing.

If you have technical questions or error reports, you can send them to
booktech@oreilly.com.  Please specify the printing date of your copy.

This page was updated September 24, 2003.

Here's a key to the markup:
	[page-number]: serious technical mistake
	{page-number}: minor technical mistake
	<page-number>: important language/formatting problem
	(page-number): language change or minor formatting problem
	?page-number?: reader question or request for clarification



Confirmed errors:


(0) Nowhere in particular:

This book is missing two things that most O'Reilly books have: a note about
the cover animal, and a thank-you list of the various people who helped out
with the book.  So, here it is, better late than never:

* The cover animal is a tegu, an iguana-like lizard that is remarkable
because it is large (about the size of a housecat), it swims, and it has
amazing coloration and patterns in its skin.  After careful thought, we
have named the coverlizard "Juche".

* A bunch of people helped a lot with getting this book out, and I'm sorry
that I didn't thank them in print.  First off, there's my superstah of an
editor, Linda Mui, as well as all the staff at O'Reilly who put extra care
and effort into everything they do.  You have /no/ idea how many people had
to be on the ball to get the book from my computer to your hands!
And then there's the tech editors, the folks who read my manuscript and
made sure it was accurate and clear, and told me when it wasn't:
   Paul DuBois
   David Hand
   Robert Rothenberg
   Peter Sergeant
   Ken Williams
Each helped me in his own specially skilled way by doing everything from
catching typoes, to suggesting better ways to explain tricky concepts, to
advising me when I was uncertain whether a particular subtopic needed to be
covered.



page 6, page 36, and page 127
On those pages, I'm slightly unclear about the character-range that is
added to Latin-1 to produce the "ANSI" character set.  So here is the
clarification:

ANSI adds a character at codepoint 128, and a character at codepoint 159,
and more characters at a bunch of codepoints inbetween.  But while ANSI is
giving you a whole block of new characters, it takes away the codepoints
127 and 160!

Latin-1 codepoint 127 is the delete character -- you'll just have to do
without that in RTF, somehow, somehow.  Latin-1 codepoint 160 is the
non-breaking space character -- just use \~ to get that, (instead of
\'a0).  Lo, verily, the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.


{18}  codeblock:
This codeblock is missing a "}" at the end.


{21}  First paragraph;
The RTF code is \li2160 and \ri2160, but the margins in the picture are 2180 and 2150.
Change \li2160 to \li2180 
and 
change  \ri2160 to \ri2150


{29}  Last bulleted paragraph;
Text says that "favorite" will be bolded, but both code samples bold "very favorite".


(32)  end of last line on page:
Missing a closequote before the period.


{40}  third paragraph
Correct "entry 4a" to "entry 4".  (There can't be such thing as an
"entry 4a" in a color table!)


(53)  Second paragraph under Newspaper Columns;
"A layout with newspaper columns is can make pages with small print or frequent linebreaks much easier to read."
should say:
"A layout with newspaper columns can make pages with small print or frequent linebreaks much easier to read."


[55]  throughout the page
Correct all cases of "\sectd\sect" to "\sect\sectd".



[62] End of first paragraph under "Embedding Images"
I say:
   But the picture data encoded in the {\pict...} construct is in a binary
   format that can't be converted to easily from a conventional image
   format (i.e., GIF, JPEG, or PNG).

This is true for GIFs, but untrue for JPEGs and PNGs.  That is, you can't
easily embed GIFs, but you /can/ easily embed JPEGs and PNGs, using the
{\pict\jpegblip\picwX\pichY...} or {\pict\pngblip\picwX\pichY...}
constructs, and embedded hex data.

I discuss this in detail, with examples, in the images_in_rtf directory of
the book's code archive.



{65}  figure 15
I note that a production slave, in an earnest attempt to save space,
cropped whitespace out of this illustration, oblivious to the fact that
the whitespace is WHAT MAKES IT A CENTERED PAGE.  So either use your
imagination, or just open the 065_vhcenter.rtf in the code archive at
this book's web site.


(110)  last comment-line in the "sub esc" routine
The reference to "Appendix A" should be to the section "Unicode in RTF",
on page 33.

(If you're curious, at the last minute, the book was rearranged and what
had been appendices A-F were moved around. The short little Appendix A
was moved to page 33-35; App B became Part II, "Creating MSWindows Help
Files"; Apps C,D, and E became Part IV "Reference Tables"; and Appendix
F became Part III, "Example Programs".  This all improved the flow of
the book, but we did miss this reference on page 110 and 120!)


(120)  last comment-line in the "sub esc" routine
The reference to "Appendix A" should be to the section "Unicode in RTF",
on page 33.

(123)  codeblock, comment line in sub unesc
To the end of this line:
   # resolve escapes like \'b1 for
...add the plusminus character
(The final plusminus character was lost during production, in spite of
my production note saying 'PRODUCTION: the last character in the line
"sub unesc..." is a plusminus symbol!!'.  Oops.)