Dear Justin
I am interested whether it will be possible in the future to export a thread also in RTF format; as it stands the only export format possible at present is XHTML1.1
Many thanks
Adrian

Thank you, Justin, for your following answer to my e-mail before I discovered this forum. I hope you don't mind that I make your answer public here:

"Adrian,
They [that is, forum users] should be able to copy and paste the threads fine.  It will probably be
better to copy and paste the entire thread using the printer friendly
version of the page, though.  You could also enable the WYSIWYG editor for
writing posts.

Justin"


Sorry to be a bore, which format will be the "printer-friendly" format? It is essential for me to be able to let my users download whole threads after their forum is closed in order to let these users edit the downloaded threads in their word processors, that is why I suggested the additional RTF format for closed threads.
Without offering this facility I cannot use E-Blah, however much I like it otherwise.
Many thanks for your understanding
Adrian

The print view is still HTML code, the downloaded print view will still be a html file, It will be offline though, so for archive purposes, print view then "save" at the top, will be fine.

All print view is, is a way of displaying the thread without images or much styling. Saves printer ink.

So am I correct in assuming that at the moment it is impossible to edit a thread (in printer-friendly format) in a word processor?
Is my clients' need so rare?
Thank you for your help so far
Adrian

You are.

I've never heard somebody ever want an ability to edit threads in a word processor and keep them offline.

It doesn't exist in any forum software I've ever used.

They can copy and paste the content of the thread to a word processor surely?  

In Invision it is possible to download threads in Word format and this has been been used extensively every time I participated in an invision forum. But the thing is that I very much prefer E-Blah over invision, not least for the support from the E-Blah community. I would very much prefer to donate the same amount of money to E-Blah as the price of invision.

About the feature I need: it is not the question of editing the threads while the corresponding forum is still running. Only after that forum is closed, would each of my client want to download the threads and edit them in a word processor.

I don't see what is wrong with this.

Many thanks for your feed-back
Adrian

That would be an interesting feature to implement. I think that it would be simple enough to do. It would just involve getting the thread's contents from the server and exporting it to rtf preserving most of the original layout. The output could include username, date, and the message for each post. Just a simple thought on how to make it work.

Many thanks, PCmanTinker, for your support.
What would it take to get this feature in one of the next versions? How should I go about promoting this idea?
Thanks
Adrian

Someone could write a mod that adds this feature. If Justin likes it enough, he might include it in a future release. I think what would help sell your idea is giving some example benefits for being able to export to rtf format. I see how it would be beneficial as it could allow for hard copy backups of forums. How will you use this addition in your website specifically?

@ PCMantinker. Read upward for how Adrian intends to use the feature.
I looked at perl code that converts from a string into RTF. But all were very old and none seemed suitable. Maybe a Perl guru such as Justin or Martin could take the old code and modify it for this, but my attempts failed...  

Ok cool. Thanks. It sounds like an interesting project, but I am not sure that I know enough about Perl to make an efficient html to rtf script. If I have the time later, I might see what I can do.

Dear pcmantinker, dear iConica,
many thanks to both of you for considering to help me. This will be really wonderful. I am sure that this might be of value also to other users in a similar situation to mine. This will put E-Blah in an advantageous position in comparison to most other forum software, as only invision has this feature at present. I know of of some communities which choose invision mainly for this reason.
Keep well and thank you
Adrian

You may be able to change the headers (as is done on the print page to save a thread) to make it open in Word since Word knows how to open HTML documents.  That MAY be a way to get it to work so it can easily be saved as a Word document.