nisus.com

Frequently recently (perhaps even always) when I receive an rtf file from someone there are strange and (presumably) unnecessary characters at the end of the text, which I have to delete. It's only with rtf, not docx files. Why am I getting these? Can they be stopped? They look like this:

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

Suggestions? Is it their problem or mine?

This is not atypical of RTF files saved by Microsoft Word. I regularly see a few pieces of such metadata included by Word using RTF controls like "datastore" or "themedata". I don't know exactly what is stored by these data, but it's totally harmless. We can assume it's probably Word-specific metadata that isn't part of the official RTF specification, e.g. some kind of Word style/theme information that isn't relevant to other apps.

The big blobs of long random alphanumeric strings you see are simply how binary data is encoded as text. You can safely ignore this data. Nisus Writer also ignores it and strips it out if you open and resave such a file.

Thanks Martin, it's never really bothered me, just curious. I figured it wasn't anything important.

Iain.