rtf-parser

rtf-parser

This is a general RTF parser. It takes a text stream and produces a document object representing the parsed document. In and of itself, this isn't super useful but it's the building block for other tools to convert RTF into other formats.

const parseRTF = require('@iarna/rtf-parser')
const fs = require('fs')

parseRTF.string('{\\rtf1\\ansi\\b hi there\\b0}', (err, doc) => {
  …
})

parseRTF.stream(fs.createReadStream('example.rtf'), (err, doc) => {
  …
})

const parser = parseRTF((err, doc) => {
  …
})
fs.createReadStream('example.rtf').pipe(parser)

RTF, unlike HTML, is NOT declarative and is instead a series of commands that mutate document state. As such, to accurately convert it you have to load into something tha tracks that state, then emit chunks of text with whatever that state was when they were emitted.

RTF, like HTML, allows (mostly) seamless degrading when you don't understand an element. As such, while this parser is still quite incomplete it is already useful

The document returned is of the RTFDocument class, see below for details.

RTF FEATURES SUPPORTED

• The following document code pages:
  437, 737, 775, 850, 852, 853, 855, 857, 858, 860, 861, 863, 865, 866, 869, 1125, 1250, 1251, 1252, 1253, 1254, 1257
• Unicode characters.
• Non-unicode representations of: non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens and non-breaking hyphens.
• Paragraph alignment: center, justified, left and right
• Style resets.
• Setting the style to "plain".
• Bold, Italic, Underline and Strikethrough.
• Superscript and Subscript.
• first line indent (for indenting the first line of paragraphs)
• indent (for indenting the entire block)
• Fonts
  • The following font character sets:
    ASCII, MacRoman, SHIFT_JIS, CP949, JOHAB, CP936, BIG5, CP1253, CP1254, CP1258, CP862, CP1256, CP1257, CP1251, CP874, CP238, CP437
• Colors (foreground and background)
• Margins

NOTABLY MISSING

Most notably, stylesheets, list styling and tables are not supported. List styling degrades cleanly but tables do not. There are certainly other required bits from the spec that are currently ignored.

CLASSES

RTFDocument

This is the class you get back from the parse functions. It has some document global options and the paragraph objects that make up the document.

• marginLeft, marginRight, marginBottom, marginTop — the margins for this document. These are in twips, which are one twentieth of a point.
• content — An array of RTFParagraph objects

RTFParagraph

• style — An object with paragraph level styling information.

  • firstLineIndent
  • indent
  • align
  • valign

• content — An array of RTFSpan objects

RTFSpan

• value — a string with the content of this region of text.
• style — an object with the span level styling infomration.
  • font
  • fontSize: In half points
  • bold: boolean
  • italic: boolean
  • underline: boolean
  • strikethrough: boolean
  • foreground: color (an object with red, green and blue values, 0-255)
  • background: color