Apple Computer Inc is heading up yet another industry club, this time to develop a standard that will enable text to be transferred between applications on dissimilar computer systems, complete with all formatting data. In the so-called Rich Text or RTXT club with Apple are Lotus Development Corp, Microsoft Corp, Aldus Corp, Claris Corp, WordPerfect Corp, Ventura Software Inc and a string of other software publishers. The aim is to retain complete text formatting and style, including tab positions, rulers, line-breaks, discretionary hyphenation, paragraph spacing, embedded objects and special text styles, when it is transferred between applications and systems. But wasn’t that what IBM Corp’s Document Content Architecture, and the Open Document Architecture were intended to do?
