I’d like to be able to render drafts as rich text and save them as proper RTF (or even RTFD) files.
As far as I can tell, this requires “true” RTF support, as opposed to the current rich text functionality which seems to be generating HTML which in turn gets interpreted as rich text by some apps. Implementing “true” RTF export as an Action seems out of scope for users as it would require importing something like the hefty jsRTF library. Then there’s the matter of writing files to disk with the proper encoding for RTF, which also seems to exceed the functionality exposed to users through the FileManager API.
For what it’s worth, here’s my use case for RTF/RTFD support:
The writing app Scrivener has a feature called Scratchpad: a floating window that displays a collection of editable notes. When Scratchpad notes are created inside Scrivener, they’re saved on disk in a user-specified directory as RTFD files. From my testing, I’ve found that the Scratchpad will also recognize RTF and plain text files placed in that directory, even if those files haven’t been generated by Scrivener.
I have Scrivener configured to store Scratchpad notes in a Dropbox folder. Currently, I’m able to use a Drafts Action to export drafts to that folder on Dropbox in plain text format. This is handy for ideas that come up for my writing projects while I’m out and about; when I get back to Scrivener on my Mac, I’ve got those notes waiting in my Scratchpad. However, the notes lose all formatting in transit. With proper RTF support, notes added to my Scrivener scratchpad from Drafts would retain their formatting.
With the upcoming support in Drafts for arbitrary syntaxes, the ability to format a draft per a specific syntax and export the resulting document as an RTF file would be even more useful.
(Apologies for posting this again. I previously asked about this functionality in this thread but never got a response.)