How to create and save a .rtf, .doc, .docx in Objective-C for iOS

objective-c ios rtf docx doc
whoacowboy picture whoacowboy · Nov 23, 2011 · Viewed 8.8k times · Source

I am looking to create and save either a rtf, doc or docx file on an iPad (iOS).

The scenario is that we'd like to assist a user in creating content on their iPad and then let them email this as an editable document cross-platform (OS X, WIN).

I am open to other solutions besides the rtf, doc or docx file format.

Thanks,

James

Answer

Isabel picture Isabel · Nov 23, 2011

RTF is going to be the easiest, because it's a plain text format. It's kind of like HTML, but without closing tags. Here is a class for writing an RTF, but it requires a lot of dependencies from elsewhere in the framework.

DOCX would be rather difficult. It's actually a zip file, containing a few XML files. You can examine the format yourself by changing the .docx extension to .zip and unzipping it. But even though XML is a fairly easy to write format, the way the text attributes are organized is still rather complicated. Also, I recall that it has to be zipped in a very specific way to be read properly.

As for DOC, it will be very difficult because it's such a complex format. You could look into some open source projects, like Abiword or Word2x. Be careful using their code because the licenses may not agree with the App Store rules.

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