Problems with RTFs in Word 2002... any users?

[JimNastics]

I recently developed an application (VB.Net) which outputs a report in RTF format. All was going well until it was discovered that, for some reason, Word 2002 didn't like the RTF, placing boxes around paragraphs and other oddities. Sods law says my clients first test-user was using Word 2002. On the plus side, at least this was discovered before we released...

Unfortunately I don't have easy access to an installation of Word 2002 to test this myself, so I'm relying on my client for feedback, which they aren't particularly good at. Is there anyone here who uses Word 2002 and could quickly test this RTF for me, and let me know what they see? Is there anyone here who knows about RTF formatting who could look at my RTF to see if I've done it right? The RTF looks absolutely fine in Wordpad, Word 2000 and Word 2003, it's just Word 2002 being a b*stard.

Please shoot me a PM if you think you could help me out!

[TheAnimus]

The nice thing about standards is there are soo many to choose from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

I've hit this one before, complained relentlessly to a mate of mine who's on the office team, to be told quite how much the excel boys look down on the word team.

In the end we shifted the clients to 2003.

[directhex]

The nice thing about standards is there are soo many to choose from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

I've hit this one before, complained relentlessly to a mate of mine who's on the office team, to be told quite how much the excel boys look down on the word team.

In the end we shifted the clients to 2003.

the nice thing about standards is they have to exist first. RTF isn't a standard. at best you can call it a specification

[JimNastics]

In the end we shifted the clients to 2003.

Unfortunately I don't have that luxury This could be used to hundreds of different people with different versions of Word. I'm so annoyed at the moment that I'm think of adding a "you must use Wordpad to view the RTF" disclaimer

Does anyone here no enough about RTF to check an example of my report and see if it's valid? The fact it opens fine in almost all versions of Word suggests it is, but try telling that to the client...

[happytechie]

word 2002's support of RTF is different to that in word 2000 and earlier versions. It supports a different version of the RTF standard

details here.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924944

Word 'should' be able to read earlier versions of RTF correctly but this is not always the case. Have you considered using another file format or providing multiple versions of files in different RTF variants.

I had a whole world of pain years ago when one of our two customers for a product upgraded from word 97 to 2000 and all of our RTF tables stopped working!

We switched file format to HTML and PDF for printing.