With WordPad being planned to be removed from Windows how do we generate rtf for EULA

[MikeWilliams-UK]

At the weekend I saw this article Microsoft is removing WordPad from Windows after nearly 30 years on the verge.

This is ringing alarm bells for our open source project Chem4Word

We currently use WiX 3.11 in combination with Visual Studio 2022 and WiX toolset extension to generate our installer (Setup.msi)

When we first started to use WiX we quickly discovered that WiX 3.* produced a blank EULA screen with the rtf file which we generated using MS Word.

Google showed us that the fix was to use WordPad to write the rtf files as MS Word was putting in information which WiX did not understand.

My Question is therefore

What versions of WiX support rtf files written by MS Word for the EULA?
If none then this is a serious issue going forward and needs to be addressed.

[robmen]

I had the same thought when I saw that article. :)

Unfortunately, this isn't an issue in the WiX codebase. The issue is in the Windows Installer itself. Its RTF control doesn't like advanced RTF content.

I'm sure something new will come along to help clean up complex RTF files. Maybe someone will even help contribute such a clean-up mechanism to WiX so we can auto-fix complex RTF.

Or maybe Microsoft will fix the RTF control in the Windows Installer to handle more complex RTF. 🤣

[BMurri]

Running msiexec.exe on my Windows 11 (fully updated, as of today) on an MSI with a license in a dialog shows that it (v5.0.22621.1) loaded version 5.31.23.1231 of riched20.dll which describes itself as Rich Text Edit Control, v3.1. Interestingly that DLL has a copyright statement that includes the year-span 1997-2008 (this for a file that appears to have been updated on my system by Microsoft from sources in May 2022).

So, referring to the Rich Edit Version 3.0 feature chart (from before) you will want to find an editor that limits itself to that version of RTF (basically what Wikipedia describes as v1.3).

A WordPad in a VM running the latest released version of Windows XP, isolated from everything but its own host, may be the safest, most effective editor.

Alternately, if someone wants to use that same DLL and create a simple editor (because that is the "purpose" of that DLL), it could go viral around the Windows Installer community.

[MikeWilliams-UK]

Here's a radical thought - Why doesn't MS add a switch/option to SaveAs RTF to choose which RTF version to save the file as...
But failing that I think a VM running old version of windows is best bet.

[MikeWilliams-UK]

Sysinternals process explorer shows that on my Windows 10 22H2 work laptop running an installer (msiexec.exe version 5.0.19041.2193) has loaded the same loaded version 5.31.23.1231 of riched20.dll as @BMurri

[MikeWilliams-UK]

Just found a UWP app on the Windows Store called "TowPad"
https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/towpad/9MTMB5PDZV2M

I have just tried it out and modifying our EULA does not balloon it like Word does
Source code for it is avaliable on GitHub at https://github.com/itsWindows11/TowPad

It is not perfect - one example being that when you hover over the scroll bars the cursor remains as the text I-Beam.

[MikeWilliams-UK]

Just found another one which is a traditional Windows Forms App in GitHub at https://github.com/vovabatsyk/WordPad
This one looks more antiquated, but does the just the same.

[jcasale]

You could maintain your source document in Markdown format and use Pandoc to programmatically convert it to rich text format.

pandoc -s eula.md -o eula.rtf

See https://pandoc.org/demos.html for more info.