QuillRTF - A Review
   By Timothy Swenson

While checking  out new QL web pages,  I ran across a utility
written  by  Pedro  Reino  of  Spain.   The  program,  called
QuillRTF, converts Quill files  to  Rich  Text  Format  (RTF)
files.   RTF was an  early format created  to share formatted
documents between different word processors.  RTF does a fair
job of keeping the formatting information of a document, such
as boldface, underlining, pararaphs, and so on.

I have  used plain ASCII  text to convert  Quill documents to
Microsoft Word.  Once the document is in Word I would have to
clean  the document up and rejoin  all of the paragraphs from
single lines.  Using RTF would save me hours of reformatting.

I downloaded Pedro's  program and  unzipped it.   Giving that
Pedro  is from Spain, the program and the documentation is in
Spanish.   My Spanish is  limited to ordering  off a take-out
menu, so I  could  not  read  the  documentation.   But,  not
reading the documentation has not stopped me before.

I  executed the program and was preseted with a Spanish Menu.
One menu item "Fichero"  was  highlighted.   Maybe  it  meant
"files"?  I hit the return key.  A submenu came up, also with
a menu  item highlighted (Convierte).  I  hit the return key.
The  program read FLP1_ and now a directory of files on FLP1_
displayed.  Ah,  now I  should be  able to  select a  file to
convert.  I  used the  arrow keys  to move  down until  I had
highlighted an example _doc file.  I hit the return key.  Now
the program  started reading  the file,  printing out  a byte
count as it  went along.  After  a minute or  so, the program
stopped and I was back to the submenu.  Guessing it was done,
I  hit the ESC key until I had exited the program.  I now did
a  directory of FLP1_ and found a  file with the same name as
the _doc file I selected, but it had an _RTF extension.

I  copied this file to an MS-DOS disk, sneaker netted it over
to my PC, and read the file into Word (telling Word it was an
RTF file).  Now I  had  my  document,  nicely  formatted,  in
Microsoft  Word.  Ah, another successfull attempt at blunding
my way through a program.

If  you are doing any conversion  of Quill documents to other
word processors  and they can handle  RTF files, then Pedro's
QuillRTF program is just what you need.  It's not the fastest
program,  but the minute it takes to covert the file saves at
least  10-15 minutes of  reformatting.  I figure  it takes me
about  15-30 seconds to reformat an average paragraph, so any
document  over a single page would  be faster to use QuillRTF
than to do it by hand.

As for what else the program can do, I have not a clue.  But,
if you can read Spanish, mabye you can find out.

    Source: geocities.com/svenqhj