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RTF is not a standard format of iOS, and the new Pages cannot read or save RTF files. At the moment, the only support for RTF provided by Apple is in TextEdit for Mac.

Paolo

Grazi Paolo.

Lou

This is the big issue not only with Nisus but also with Devon and Scrivener, the three best soft for Mac. They depend completely on rtf, but the rtf engine of apple is crippled, meaning it does not retain style definitions. If you apply for instance a defined character style to a word with Nisus and open the file in Scrivener or Devon the style disappear and the file returns to a flat rtf file where all the styles are lost.
Apple not developing rtf for iOs and not supporting it in its system engine has adopted a policy to disadvantage independent software like Nisus, Devon and Scrivener. I think that the future of these 3 great softwares in in peril. Unless markdown does not improve and becomes mainstream.
Have a nice day.

In case you like to separate content from formatting, the markdown version implemented in Ulysses III (Markdown XL) is not bad. It seems to me to cover everything a writer needs (document outlining and structuring, emphasis, keywording, commenting, annotating, linking to internal and external targets, linking to footnotes/endnotes and images).

However, for layout and final delivery in traditional print format you still need to convert it to RTF (or to InDesign, if you go directly to a page layout application for producing a book or magazine). I've started to think that file format converters are a very important part of writing and supporting an iOS writing app.

Scrivener has a good MultiMarkdown converter (and it's a shame that it is not compatibile with the much smarter Markdown XL). Nisus Writer has some macros to convert between RTF and Markdown – maybe some of us should make an integral converter for all the MultiMarkdown/Markdown XL occurrences?

(There is already a way of easily going from Ulysses III to Nisus Writer: exporting from the former as an RTF file. The generated file will include paragraph styles, and be immediately usable in Nisus. The reverse path is not as easy).

Paolo

RTF not being supported properly by Apple? Big surprise. They are playing their nasty old game to cripple developers.

cheers. geoff

To be more precise rtf has been developed by Microsoft. The same company decided not to improve it. Apple decided that rtf would not be allowed on the iOS and dropped from Pages.
For a concise story of this standard please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format.

Emilio is right, but there are considerations about RTF to be kept in mind:

- RTF is a widely supported interchange standard; despite several dialects exist, they are all widely compatible;
- contrary to DOC, RTF is future-proof, since text strings can still be read and extracted from the file;
- replacing RTF with an XML-based open standard would be nice, but replacing it with a proprietary, cripted format like DOC/DOCX is not a fair trade.

Paolo

Emilio_Speciale wrote:To be more precise rtf has been developed by Microsoft. The same company decided not to improve it. Apple decided that rtf would not be allowed on the iOS and dropped from Pages.
For a concise story of this standard please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format.

I was aware of that, Emilio. Macrosith must have had a bad shock when they realized they were supporting an interchange format that would allow people to migrate away from Word. Mind you, that was back in the day when Word and Microsoft Works WP documents could not be interchanged; MS still had people doing stuff independently within the organization which actually was pretty stupid.

But then they got their sithy act together and abandoned RTF as soon as they conveniently could.

cheers, geoff