Android doesn’t support the RTF formats.
I never knew this. Seriously, I never knew.
I decided I could get more writing done if I wrote on my phone while away from my computer. DropBox would let me keep things synced so I don’t have to type anything over again. I could gain some of the hours I spend reading on my kindle (I take it everywhere and whip it out whenever I have a free moment) and instead just write on the phone.
I can write a few hundred words on my phone – I have done it before for friday flash and other short stories – and an extra hundred words sound so good!
So I install DropBox on my phone, link my Scrivener to DropBox. Well, I link the RTF file Scrivener produces when you compile. (I have windows Scrivener, which is quite incapable of linking automatically to DropBox.)
But than I found that Android can’t open RTF files. That is to say, Android won’t open it cleanly. The file is filled other text. It looks formatting text, but nothing that I am interested in. Certainly nothing I can use to write.
I thought mobile OpenOffice would surely open RTF files. It doesn’t. That is not to say there aren’t other apps that will open RTF files. There are. But they are all readers; there is noting that will let me edit RTF files. Which makes writing on the phone impossible.
I tried several other things:
1) coping and pasting the text from a read-only app to another app. This isn’t worth the time it takes.
2) changing the extension to DOC to see if OpenOffice could read it. No joy.
3) searching the android app store for other apps. Found one: OfficeSuite Pro. But it requires call read permission, which is a no go. A word processing app so does not need to know monitor my phone calls. It needs to know nothing related to my phone state and identity. It isn’t the app’s business.
So writing on the phone and keeping things synced is a no go. Sucks. Really really sucks.
I am going to have change the compiled file into a DOC file before syncing with DropBox. It sucks. It should work better than this.
RTF is supposed to be the format every single word processor can open. I am really disappointed with Android.
I’m sorry, Sonia. That’s a surprising failing on the technology’s part.
Surprise is the word. Wondering if Google Drive will work better
I type all of my work directly into Evernote on my phone, and then when I open the program on my laptop, there it is! It’s quite easy and it means you don’t have to save an actual file on your phone.
Have you tried ThinkFree? That might help you with the RTF files but I’m not sure. I do know that you can transfer the Android documents from that app to your computer or email them to yourself. I also sIcy’s recommendation for Google Drive. There is an app for Google Drive that may be of use to you and Evernote is also worth a try as well.
By the way, it’s about time that I tell you that am sooo digging your new blog design. It rocks!
I’m as disappointed and mystified as you are. I work in Atlantis which is an excellent word processor with .rtf as its native file format. I too have dumped it into Dropbox but then couldn’t retrieve it on my Android tablet. I did some research and found that the .rtf format belongs to Microsoft which they created (or bought) for their simple word processor, Wordpad. It really had no other life except that now many writing tools also use this format. It’s a problem with Android, or rather the Android app creators. Perhaps they need to buy publishing rights from Microsoft or something and there really isn’t a big enough market to justify it. The app world is driven by the gamers and if it isn’t a game or won’t play games it probably won’t be done. We can keep looking but so far there isn’t a solution now or on the horizon. How are you at programming an app for it. I would gladly buy it.
This was the beginning of my decision to dump all things Android. A company with the cash and coding power of Google can handle this trivially; that they don’t bother tells me what they think of me as a user. Apple may condescend and restrict, but at least the stuff usually works. Next stop for me, the limited, expensive but actually functional iphone. I’m hoping the new Blackberry takes off — the market needs a 3rd, business and productivity oriented option.
iPhone, as of now (March 10, 2013) ) doesn’t have an working option, either. Rich Text app (with in-app purchase for Formatting Kit) has no way of opening rtf files from Dropbox. Only way to edit an rtf file is actually to create an rtf within Rich Text app. Can’t even open from Dropbox with “Open In…”. What Rich Text can do is creating an rtf file in it, then opening it in another app.
iPad, has Textilus which works better. But then you have to have an iPad. But that seems to be the best option to sync with Scrivener.
Oh and all the formatting gets stripped away if you copy and paste any text into/out of iOS. I guess all mobile platforms are screwed for now.