---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                   Files Accompanying /RTF Pocket Guide/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

  "Try to make things that can become better in other people's minds than
  they were in yours" -- Brian Eno, /A Year with Swollen Appendices/


Dear Reader,

Congratulations on your subtle taste and fine discernment in buying my
book, /RTF Pocket Guide/. I do hope you'll find the book helpful with
whatever RTF-related tasks you have in mind.

This archive contains all the example documents and subsantial
codeblocks from the book, plus some other interesting goodies.



I've heard it said that Mary McCarthy (an unjustly forgotten author) was
fond of pointing out that if you got nothing else out of /War and Peace/,
there was always Tolstoy's gourmet recipe for strawberry jam!
(Actually it was in /Anna Karenina/, chapter two; I don't know whether
the error is McCarthy's, or of the person (Gore Vidal) that I heard
quoting her.)  In any case, if you get nothing else out of /RTF Pocket
Guide/ and/or this distribution of files accompanying it, at least you'll
get a decent ASCII chart, and instructions for making an origami CD case.

I have been asked about some of the foreign words and phrases I use in the
book.  The Latin text is explained in ./outtakes/latin.rtf in this archive.

The phrase "Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen"
is a famous musing of Wittgenstein's which means "If a lion knew how to
speak, we would not know how to understand".

The German word "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" in section "Hyphenation
Point" means "coming to terms with our past" -- prototypically 'our'
Nazi past, although it is applied variously, and so a more modern
translation might be "truth and reconciliation".

The Sanskrit word "Trimsikavijñaptimatratasiddhih" means "Thirty-canto
treatise on consciousness-only" and is the title of a work by the
philosopher Vasubandhu, lived around in the 4th century AD, in the
Peshawar province of India.  History reports that he and his brother
Asanga may have had other brothers, who were ALSO named Asanga and/or
Vasubandhu.  Kind reader, I could not have made this up.

Similarly, I did not make up these facts about other words that occur
in the book:

* get-internal-real-time is a real ANSI Common Lisp function.

* 2-chloro-4-ethylamino-6-isopropylamino-1,3,5-triazine is a real
chemical name of the popular (and possibly carcinogenic) pesticide
Atrazine.

* "Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication" (et al) in the origami CD case
section, really is a track on the 1975 Parliament Funkadelic album
/Mothership Connection/.

* AccessibleAWTCheckboxMenuItem and ChangeToParentDirectoryAction
are real symbol names in some popular Java libraries.

* /Navajo Made Easier/ is really a book by Irvy Goosen, /Who's Afraid of
Luxembourgish?/ is really a book by Jul Christophory, and /Learn
Maltese, Why Not?/ is really a book by Joseph Vella.



		-- Sean M. Burke
		   Juneau, Alaska
		   July 2003