Date: Tue, 15 Sep 92 09:43:08 MDT
From: yackd@utah.et.byu.edu (Don Yacktman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy
Distribution: world
Organization: Brigham Young University, Provo UT USA
Subject: Re: RTF Compression


In article <neuss.716556157@carioca>, neuss@igd.fhg.de (Christian Neuss ) writes:
>Dear fellow netters,
>
>prim!dave@germany.eu.net (Dave Griffiths) writes:
>
>>One way to make people feel better about RTF posts would be to make them
>>use less bandwidth. Since the majority of RTF posts consist only of text
>>in a variety of fonts, the current NewsGrazer format is maybe a little
>>inefficient. It repeats the entire body of the text at the end in uuencoded
>>RTF format.
>
>>Surely a more efficient way of doing this would be to include at the end
>>just the font change information, with suitable pointers to the positions
>>in the preceding ascii text?
>
>Ah! At last! Somebody comes up with a reasonable idea!

Actually, I remember seeing this idea suggested about a year and a half
ago (at least).  I don't remember who it was, but they were working on a
newsreader that would do this (so they said)...and then later on
NewsGrazer came out...and NewsGrazer is obviously inefficient!  (If you
send a binary attachment, it gets uuencoded, inserted into the rich text
and compressed, and then uuencoded again!  Yuck!!!!)

As I recall, this indexing thing is a bit more difficult to implement
(and I can see why from the programmer's point of view) but I still
think it's quite possible and could be done rather easily.  It would
also help to cut out the complaints a little, since the junk at the
end is smaller in size.

Now my question is, who's going to implement this?  Any volunteers?

>Really folks, this has made me quite upset. All these flame wars about
>huge RTF posts are only there because of the *stupid* format that
>newsgrazers uses. It is completely unnecessary to double the whole
>posting just because 
> ... munch ...

Exactly.  The format is brain dead.  A _quick hack_, and nothing more.
Rather then flaming, we should be doing something about it, like replacing
an inefficient data transmission system with something better.  I'm
getting sick of seeing this thread...it never goes away, it seems...
and I _like_ to see RTF when warranted, even though I have to jump
through hoops to read it.  (To read RTF I have to save the article,
put it on DAT, take it home, put it on my machine there, and then
run NGService on it...before that I unpacked it by hand...)  Well,
anyway, who's going to write the program?  Initially it could just
be a data filter, like a service:  (1) convert RTF to plain text with
appropriate codes at the end and (2) convert plain text with codes to
RTF.  That would interoperate with just about any NeXT program, and
then you can later incorporate the engine into a real newsreader.
Just putting the engine into the public domain would be better than
the mess we have with NewsGrazer, because then the format becomes
more plainly documented, with sample code anyone can use in their
own program.  The big drawback here is that you end up with yet one
more "multimedia" data format, in the jumble along with MIME, NeXTmail,
and everything else.  I like this idea better than MIME, though,
since the formatting directives aren't embedded in the text, thus
the text is easier to read on a plain old vanilla news reader.  The
advantages over a huge uuencoded blob are obvious.

Well, enough rambling.  Back to work...

-Don Yacktman
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy