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From: teexdwu@ioe.lon.ac.uk (DOMINIK WUJASTYK)
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Spec for DCA file format?
Message-ID: <1991May8.191918.2577@ioe.lon.ac.uk>
Date: 8 May 91 19:19:18 GMT
References: <1991May8.100805.21416@ioe.lon.ac.uk>
Reply-To: teexdwu@ioe.lon.ac.uk (DOMINIK WUJASTYK)
Organization: Institute of Education University of London
Lines: 24

In article <1991May8.100805.21416@ioe.lon.ac.uk> andrew@uxm.sm.ucl.ac.uk writes:
>[Apologies if this has been asked before]
>
>Does anyone out there have any details on DCA file format. This seems to
>be commonly used as an export/import format by many PC applications, but I have
>yet to find a source of the specification.

Last time I was interested, there was no easily available published 
description of the DCA format.  If you *have* to work with it, then
you have to.  But if you *can* aviod doing so, DO.  For a while,
DCA was the closest to a standard interchange format that was 
generally available in the world of commercial text processors, but
that throne has now gone to Microsoft's RTF.

Also, NB that XyQuest has now done a deal with IBM so that IBM has full
rights to the next version of XyWrite (version IV).  This is to become
IBM's flagship word processing program, I gather, and will have
built-in facilities to help DisplayWrite users to convert.  DisplayWrite
(can) use DCA (aka RFT, no relation of RTF), and XyWrite's file format
is a sheer joy, and dead easy to work with (it's mostly plain ASCII).
So if you are looking at a big DCA - to - XX translation job, you 
might want to wait a few months and look at what comes with XyWrite IV.

Dominik