Writing your dissertation with Microsoft Word Book

RTF is a powerful--albeit antiquated and somewhat obfuscated--system for marking up text. Most people probably have read an RTF file before in their OS's native RTF reader... or have saved a Microsoft Word document as Rich Text Format. Sean Burke's handy little pocket book is one of the few sources of information for dealing with the markup language directly. I cannot in good conscience recommend writing RTF markup manually (as one might HTML)--however, if you are a programmer having to write, export, or parse raw RTF, then this book is a good starting point and a great reference to have on your bookshelf. The book is small and concise. One quibble: a book this slim really should have jettisoned the section on "Creating MS Windows Help Files" in favor of something more universal and practical (e.g., dealing with headers & footers). As an added bonus: the author is a nice guy, having answered a question I had about an RTF project within a single day of emailing. There are a couple of errors in the book, so be sure to grab the errata from the publisher's site.