[spiritualfields]

Using Notepad, I typed the following, using the book The Developer's Guide To
WINHELP.EXE as a reference, and saved it as HEADER.RTF (it's approx 30 lines,
and you can probably skip over it to get to the rest of my problem
description, which is where Word 2003 gets involved):

{\rtf1

{\fonttbl
{\f0\fswiss MS Sans Serif;}
{\f1\fmodern Courier;}
{\f2\ftech Symbol;}
{f3\froman Times New Roman;}
{f4\fnil\ System;}
}

{\comment
Color table follows. Colors a
1 - Black
2 - Blue
3 - Cyan
4 - Green
5 - Magenta
6 - Red
7 - Yellow
8 - White
9 - Dark Blue
10 - Dark Cyan
11 - Dark Green
12 - Dark Magenta
13 - Dark Red
14 - Dark Yellow
15 - Dark Gray
16 - Light Gray
}

{\colortbl;
\red0\green0\blue0;
\red0\green0\blue255;
\red0\green255\blue255;
\red0\green255\blue0;
\red255\green0\blue255;
\red255\green0\blue0;
\red255\green255\blue;
\red255\green255\blue255;
\red0\green0\blue127;
\red0\green127\blue127;
\red0\green127\blue0;
\red127\green0\blue127;
\red127\green0\blue0;
\red127\green127\blue0;
\red127\green127\blue127;
\red192\green192\blue192;
}

\ansi\deff0\pard
}

After saving this file, I opened it using Word 2003, but none of the text
showed. I just get a blank screen, yet the Caption Bar at the top of Word
indicates that my file HEADER.RTF is indeed open and being viewed.

On my system, I have Notepad, TextPad, Wordpad, and Word 2003 as my word
processors. The file opens and displays properly when I open it with Notepad
and Textpad. However, when I open it with Wordpad, only the characters
enclosed with the \comment brace are displayed. And as I mentioned earlier,
Word displays none of the content whatsover.

What I then did was copy the entire contents of the HEADER.RTF file and
pasted it into a new Word document, saving it as HEADER1.RTF. The first thing
I noticed is that this new file is 5kb long, while the original was only 1kb.

However, now notepad and wordpad, when viewing this new file, show the
original text but also interspersed before and within it are a host of
different formatting characters.

I have no idea what is going on here, and why I can't just type an RTF
document and have all of my word processors read it properly, the way I typed
it.

To reproduce what I'm talking about, all you have to do is copy the contents
of the file that I pasted, and save it into a notepad file as an RTF file
(not .txt). And then try to open it in Word.

Ultimately, I'll probably use Word to write my RTF files. But what is
upsetting right now is why it won't acknowledge an RTF file written with
Notepad.