RTF format never works

[Reality]

Every time I try to download a RTF Export file, when I use the file it just gives me three lines of text in the export: Character Name, Alternate Identity and Player Name. Nothing else shows up.

Note that the RTF's that come with Hero Designer don't exhibit this problem, only those I download from the discussion boards or from the membership area of the site.

Any idea what I need to do to get these RTF's to actually show a character sheet?

[Hyper-Man]

That sounds like a conflict between whatever version of word or other document software used to create the RTF export and what you have installed to read it on your machine.

[RPMiller]

Which RTF templates are you using? What version of HD are you using?

[mudpyr8]

My guess is it is an rtf compatibility issue. Many of the rtf formats are only viewable in Word.

[RPMiller]

Since I wrote mine from scratch with RTF and didn't use any Word specific code, they should be viewable in Open Office and WordPad as well, but it depends on which one is being used. Some of the formatting will go screwy if it is the "snazzier" templates. However, he said the built-in RTFs work, and since I wrote them as well, I'm wondering if he just has some bad templates. It could also be the tags in the templates are not compatible. I updated all the tags, removing the old ones, for the latest version of HD templates.

[mudpyr8]

My "snazzier" templates definitely only work in Word. I have begun work on a 3 column format that I am using OpenOffice as the reference for, so hopefully that will be more compatible. Columns are often the issue, and tables. I'm going to avoid tables, but columns are just to useful for condensing space.

[RPMiller]

Are you "cheating" by creating an RTF in the application and then editing it with notepad or something? RTF is a formatting language like PDF, so if you write the code rather than going the painless, easy route, it tends to be a lot cleaner and free of any application specific code. All my templates, to the best of my knowledge, work in OpenOffice with the exception of the ones that require the Word formatting tags such as the latest one I did that has curved rectangles and matches the "official" character sheet in the book. The tags for columns in RTF are not application specific, as far as recall. They are just breaks with the paragraph formatting specified.

[mudpyr8]

Yeah, I modeled my stuff after yours, but some of the really fancy editing I had to copy some of the codes directly from the app. However, I don't copy all of the control codes MS uses, just the formatting codes so it is pretty clean. Mostly the columns and tables cause my woes, but the new one should be cleaner.

[RPMiller]

Cool. Also be aware that a lot of the codes that don't appear to be MS specific are actually not needed either and can cause problems if the formatting is not used elsewhere. Like most programming languages there are both required and optional tags/codes in RTF. It sounds like you have it all under control though. I did find for my own use that it was usually easier to deal with tab stops and line returns rather than tables, so I definitely understand your woes.