Network Working Group                                     P. Resnick
INTERNET-DRAFT                                             A. Walker
To-obsolete RFCs: 1523, 1563                           November 1995
Category: Informational         <draft-resnick-text-enriched-00.txt>

                     The text/enriched MIME Content-type

Status of this Memo

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Abstract

MIME [RFC-1521] defines a format and general framework for the
representation of a wide variety of data types in Internet mail. This
document defines one particular type of MIME data, the text/enriched
MIME type. The text/enriched MIME type is intended to facilitate the
wider interoperation of simple enriched text across a wide variety of
hardware and software platforms. This document is only a minor revision
to the text/enriched MIME type that was first described in [RFC-1523]
and [RFC-1563], and is only intended to be used in the short term until
other MIME types for text formatting in Internet mail are developed and
deployed.

The text/enriched MIME type

In order to promote the wider interoperability of simple formatted
text, this document defines an extremely simple subtype of the MIME
content-type "text", the "text/enriched" subtype. The content-type line
for this type may have one optional parameter, the "charset" parameter,
with the same values permitted for the "text/plain" MIME content-type.

The text/enriched subtype was designed to meet the following criteria:

  1. The syntax must be extremely simple to parse, so that even
     teletype-oriented mail systems can easily strip away the
     formatting information and leave only the readable text.

  2. The syntax must be extensible to allow for new formatting commands
     that are deemed essential for some application.

  3. If the character set in use is ASCII or an 8- bit ASCII superset,
     then the raw form of the data must be readable enough to be
     largely unobjectionable in the event that it is displayed on the
     screen of the user of a non-MIME-conformant mail reader.

  4. The capabilities must be extremely limited, to ensure that it can
     represent no more than is likely to be representable by the user's
     primary word processor. While this limits what can be sent, it
     increases the likelihood that what is sent can be properly
     displayed.

There are other text formatting standards which meet some of these
criteria.  In particular, HTML and SGML have come into widespread use
on the Internet.  However, there are two important reasons that this
document further promotes the use of text/enriched in Internet mail
over other such standards:

  1. Most MIME-aware Internet mail applications are already able to
     either properly format text/enriched mail or, at the very least,
     are able to strip out the formatting commands and display the
     readable text. The same is not true for HTML or SGML.

  2. The current RFC on HTML [RFC-1866] and Internet Drafts on SGML
     have many features which are not necessary for Internet mail, and
     are missing a few capabilities that text/enriched already has.

For these reasons, this document is promoting the use of text/enriched
until other Internet standards come into more widespread use. For those
who will want to use HTML, Appendix B of this document contains a very
simple C program that converts text/enriched to HTML 2.0 described in
[RFC-1866].

Syntax

The syntax of "text/enriched" is very simple. It represents text in a
single character set--US-ASCII by default, although a different
character set can be specified by the use of the "charset" parameter.
(The semantics of text/enriched in non-ASCII character sets are
discussed later in this document.) All characters represent themselves,
with the exception of the "<" character (ASCII 60), which is used to
mark the beginning of a formatting command. A literal less-than sign
("<") can be represented by a sequence of two such characters, "<<".

Formatting instructions consist of formatting commands surrounded by
angle brackets ("<>", ASCII 60 and 62). Each formatting command may be
no more than 60 characters in length, all in US-ASCII, restricted to
the alphanumeric and hyphen ("-") characters. Formatting commands may
be preceded by a solidus ("/", ASCII 47), making them negations, and
such negations must always exist to balance the initial opening
commands. Thus, if the formatting command "<bold>" appears at some
point, there must later be a "</bold>" to balance it. (NOTE: The 60
character limit on formatting commands does NOT include the "<", ">",
or "/" characters that might be attached to such commands.)

Line break rules

Line breaks (CRLF pairs in standard network representation) are handled
specially. In particular, isolated CRLF pairs are translated into a
single SPACE character. Sequences of N consecutive CRLF pairs, however,
are translated into N-1 actual line breaks. This permits long lines of
data to be represented in a natural looking manner despite the
frequency of line-wrapping in Internet mailers. When preparing the data
for mail transport, isolated line breaks should be inserted wherever
necessary to keep each line shorter than 80 characters. When preparing
such data for presentation to the user, isolated line breaks should be
replaced by a single SPACE character, and N consecutive CRLF pairs
should be presented to the user as N-1 line breaks.

Thus text/enriched data that looks like this:

    This is
    a single
    line

    This is the
    next line.


    This is the
    next paragraph.

should be displayed by a text/enriched interpreter as follows:

    This is a single line
    This is the next line.

    This is the next paragraph.

The formatting commands, not all of which will be implemented by all
implementations, are described in the following sections.

Formatting Commands

The text/enriched formatting commands all begin with <commandname> and
end with </commandname>, affecting the formatting of the text between
those two tokens. The commands are described here, grouped according to
type.

Parameter Command

Some of the formatting commands may require one or more associated
parameters. The "param" command is a special formatting command used to
include these parameters.

    Param
        Marks the affected text as command parameters, to be
        interpreted or ignored by the text/enriched interpreter, but
        not to be shown to the reader. The "param" command always
        immediately follows some other formatting command, and the
        parameter data indicates some additional information about
        the formatting that is to be done. The syntax of the
        parameter data (whatever appears between the initial
        "<param>" and the terminating "</param>") is defined for each
        command that uses it. However, it is always required that the
        format of such data must not contain nested "param" commands,
        and either must not use the "<" character or must use it in a
        way that is compatible with text/enriched parsing. That is,
        the end of the parameter data should be recognizable with
        either of two algorithms: simply searching for the first
        occurrence of "</param>" or parsing until a balanced
        "</param>" command is found. In either case, however, the
        parameter data should not be shown to the human reader.

Font-Alteration Commands

The following formatting commands are intended to alter the font in
which text is displayed, but not to alter the indentation or
justification state of the text:

    Bold
        causes the affected text to be in a bold font. Nested bold
        commands have the same effect as a single bold command.

    Italic
        causes the affected text to be in an italic font. Nested
        italic commands have the same effect as a single italic
        command.

    Underline
        causes the affected text to be underlined. Nested underline
        commands have the same effect as a single underline command.

    Fixed
        causes the affected text to be in a fixed width font. Nested
        fixed commands have the same effect as a single fixed
        command.

    FontFamily
        causes the affected text to be displayed in a specified
        typeface. The "fontfamily" command requires a parameter that
        is specified by using the "param" command. The parameter data
        is a case-insensitive string containing the name of a font
        family. Any currently available font family name (e.g. Times,
        Palatino, Courier, etc.) may be used. This includes font
        families defined by commercial type foundries such as Adobe,
        BitStream, or any other such foundry. Note that
        implementations should only use the general font family name,
        not the specific font name (e.g. use "Times", not
        "TimesRoman" nor "TimesBoldItalic"). Also note that the
        "fontfamily" command is advisory only; it should not be
        expected that other implementations will honor the typeface
        information in this command since the font capabilities of
        systems vary drastically.

    Color
        causes the affected text to be displayed in a specified
        color. The "color" command requires a parameter that is
        specified by using the "param" command. The parameter data
        can be one of the following:

               red
               blue
               green
               yellow
               cyan
               magenta
               black
               white

        or an RGB color value in the form:

               ####,####,####

        where '#' is a hexadecimal digit '0' through '9', 'A' through
        'F', or 'a' through 'f'. The three 4-digit hexadecimal values
        are the RGB values for red, green, and blue respectively,
        where each component is expressed as an unsigned value
        between 0 (0000) and 65535 (FFFF). The default color for the
        message is unspecified, though black is a common choice in
        many environments. Text/enriched implementations should not
        produce "color" commands that are nested, but in the event
        that nested "color" commands are enountered, the inner
        "color" command takes precedence.

    Smaller
        causes the affected text to be in a smaller font. It is
        recommended that the font size be changed by two points, but
        other amounts may be more appropriate in some environments.
        Nested smaller commands produce ever smaller fonts, to the
        limits of the implementation's capacity to reasonably display
        them, after which further smaller commands have no
        incremental effect.

    Bigger
        causes the affected text to be in a bigger font. It is
        recommended that the font size be changed by two points, but
        other amounts may be more appropriate in some environments.
        Nested bigger commands produce ever bigger fonts, to the
        limits of the implementation's capacity to reasonably display
        them, after which further bigger commands have no incremental
        effect.

While the "bigger" and "smaller" operators are effectively inverses, it
is not recommended, for example, that "<smaller>" be used to end the
effect of "<bigger>". This is properly done with "</bigger>".

Since the capabilities of implementations will vary, it is to be
expected that some implementations will not be able to act on some of
the font-alteration commands. However, an implementation should still
display the text to the user in a reasonable fashion. In particular,
the lack of capability to display a particular font family, color, or
other text attribute does not mean that an implementation should fail
to display text.

Fill/Justification/Indentation Commands

Initially, text/enriched text is intended to be displayed fully filled
(that is, using the rules specified for replacing CRLF pairs with
spaces or removing them as appropriate) with appropriate kerning and
letter-tracking, and using the maximum available margins as suits the
capabilities of the receiving user agent software.

The following commands alter that state. Each of these commands force a
line break before and after the formatting environment if there is not
otherwise a line break. For example, if one of these commands occurs
anywhere other than the beginning of a line of text as presented, a new
line is begun.

    Center
        causes the affected text to be centered.

    FlushLeft
        causes the affected text to be left-justified with a ragged
        right margin.

    FlushRight
        causes the affected text to be right-justified with a ragged
        left margin.

    FlushBoth
        causes the affected text to be filled and padded so as to
        create smooth left and right margins, i.e., to be fully
        justified.

    Nofill
        causes the affected text to be displayed without filling or
        justification. That is, the text is displayed without using
        the rules for replacing CRLF pairs with spaces or removing
        consecutive sequences of CRLF pairs and is displayed in the
        default justification without making any adjustments for
        flushing text to either margin.

    ParaIndent
        causes the running margins of the affected text to be moved
        in. The recommended indentation change is the width of four
        characters, but this may differ among implementations. The
        "paraindent" command requires a parameter that is specified
        by using the "param" command. The parameter data is a
        comma-seperated list of between one and four of the
        following:

          Left
             causes the running left margin to be moved to the
             right.

          Right
             causes the running right margin to be moved to the
             left.

          In
             causes the first line of the affected text to be
             indented in addition to the running margin. The
             remaining lines remain flush to the running margin.

          Out
             causes all lines except for the first line of the
             affected text to be indented in addition to the running
             margin. The first line remains flush to the running
             margin.

The center, flushleft, flushright, and flushboth commands are mutually
exclusive, and, when nested, the inner command takes precedence.

Nested "paraindent" commands cause the affected text to be further
indented according to the parameters.

Whether or not text is justified by default (that is, whether the
default environment is flushleft, flushright, or flushboth) is
unspecified, and depends on the preferences of the user, the
capabilities of the local software and hardware, and the nature of the
character set in use. On systems where justification is considered
undesirable, the flushboth environment may be identical to the default
environment. Note that justification should never be performed inside
of center, flushleft, flushright, or nofill environments. Note also
that for some non-ASCII character sets, full justification may be
fundamentally inappropriate.

Note that [RFC-1563] defined two additional indentation commands,
"Indent" and "IndentRight". These commands did not force a line break,
and therefore their behavior was unpredictable since they depended on
the margins and character sizes that a particular implementation used.
Therefore, their use is deprecated and they should be ignored just as
other unrecognized commands.

Markup Commands

Commands in this section, unlike the other text/enriched commands are
declarative markup commands. Text/enriched is not intended as a full
markup language, but instead as a simple way to represent common
formatting commands. Therefore, markup commands are purposely kept to a
minimum. It is only because each was deemed so prevalent or necessary
in an e-mail environment that these particular commands have been
included at all.

    Excerpt
        causes the affected text to be interpreted as a textual
        excerpt from another source, probably a message being
        responded to. Typically this will be displayed using
        indentation and an alternate font, or by indenting lines and
        preceding them with "> ", but such decisions are up to the
        implementation. Note that as with the justification commands,
        the excerpt command implicitly begins and ends with a line
        break if one is not already there. Nested "excerpt" commands
        are acceptable and should be interpreted as meaning that the
        excerpted text was excerpted from yet another source. Again,
        this can be displayed using additional indentation, different
        colors, etc.

        Optionally, the "excerpt" command can take a parameter by
        using the "param" command. The format of the data is
        unspecified, but it is intended to uniquely identify the text
        from which the excerpt is taken. With this information, an
        implementation should be able to uniquely identify the source
        of any particular excerpt, especially if two or more excerpts
        in the message are from the same source, and display it in
        some way that makes this apparent to the user.

    Lang
        causes the affected text to be interpreted as belonging to a
        particular language. This is most useful when two different
        languages use the same character set, but may require a
        different font or formatting depending on the language. For
        instance, Chinese and Japanese share similar character
        glyphs, and in some character sets like UNICODE share common
        code points, but it is considered very important that
        different fonts be used for the two languages, especially if
        they appear together, so that meaning is not lost. Also,
        language information can be used to allow for fancier text
        handling, like spell checking or hyphenation.

        The "lang" command requires a parameter using the "param"
        command. The parameter data can be any of the language tags
        specified in [RFC-1766], "Tags for the Identification of
        Languages". These tags are the two letter language codes
        taken from [ISO-639] or can be other language codes that
        are registered according to the instructions in the
        Langauge Tags RFC. Consult that memo for further
        information.

Balancing and Nesting of Formatting Commands

Pairs of formatting commands must be properly balanced and nested.
Thus, a proper way to describe text in bold italics is:

    <bold><italic>the-text</italic></bold>

or, alternately,

    <italic><bold>the-text</bold></italic>

but, in particular, the following is illegal text/enriched:

    <bold><italic>the-text</bold></italic>

The nesting requirement for formatting commands imposes a slightly
higher burden upon the composers of text/enriched bodies, but
potentially simplifies text/enriched displayers by allowing them to be
stack-based. The main goal of text/enriched is to be simple enough to
make multifont, formatted email widely readable, so that those with the
capability of sending it will be able to do so with confidence. Thus
slightly increased complexity in the composing software was deemed a
reasonable tradeoff for simplified reading software. Nonetheless,
implementors of text/enriched readers are encouraged to follow the
general Internet guidelines of being conservative in what you send and
liberal in what you accept. Those implementations that can do so are
encouraged to deal reasonably with improperly nested text/enriched
data.

Unrecognized formatting commands

Implementations must regard any unrecognized formatting command as
"no-op" commands, that is, as commands having no effect, thus
facilitating future extensions to "text/enriched". Private extensions
may be defined using formatting commands that begin with "X-", by
analogy to Internet mail header field names.

In order to formally define extended commands, a new Internet document
should be published.

White Space in Text/enriched Data

No special behavior is required for the SPACE or TAB (HT) character. It
is recommended, however, that, at least when fixed-width fonts are in
use, the common semantics of the TAB (HT) character should be observed,
namely that it moves to the next column position that is a multiple of
8. (In other words, if a TAB (HT) occurs in column n, where the
leftmost column is column 0, then that TAB (HT) should be replaced by
8-(n mod 8) SPACE characters.) It should also be noted that some mail
gateways are notorious for losing (or, less commonly, adding) white
space at the end of lines, so reliance on SPACE or TAB characters at
the end of a line is not recommended.

Initial State of a text/enriched interpreter

Text/enriched is assumed to begin with filled text in a variable-width
font in a normal typeface and a size that is average for thecurrent
display and user. The left and right margins are assumed to be maximal,
that is, at the leftmost and rightmost acceptable positions.

Non-ASCII character sets

One of the great benefits of MIME is the ability to use different
varieties of non-ASCII text in messages. To use non-ASCII text in a
message, normally a charset parameter is specified in the Content-type
line that indicates the character set being used. For purposes of this
RFC, any legal MIME charset parameter can be used with the
text/enriched Content-type. However, there are two difficulties that
arise with regard to the text/enriched Content-type when non-ASCII text
is desired. The first problem involves difficulties that occur when the
user wishes to create text which would normally require multiple
non-ASCII character sets in the same text/enriched message. The second
problem is an ambiguity that arises because of the text/enriched use of
the "<" character in formatting commands.

Using multiple non-ASCII character sets

Normally, if a user wishes to produce text which contains characters
from entirely different character sets within the same MIME message
(for example, using Russian Cyrillic characters from ISO 8859-5 and
Hebrew characters from ISO 8859-8), a multipart message is used. Every
time a new character set is desired, a new MIME body part is started
with different character sets specified in the charset parameter of the
Content-type line. However, using multiple character sets this way in
text/enriched messages introduces problems. Since a change in the
charset parameter requires a new part, text/enriched formatting
commands used in the first part would not be able to apply to text that
occurs in subsequent parts. It is not possible for text/enriched
formatting commands to apply across MIME body part boundaries.

RFC 1341 attempted to get around this problem in the now obsolete
text/richtext format by introducing different character set formatting
commands like "iso-8859-5" and "us-ascii". But this, or even a more
general solution along the same lines, is still undesirable: It is
common for a MIME application to decide, for example, what character
font resources or character lookup tables it will require based on the
information provided by the charset parameter of the Content-type line,
before it even begins to interpret or display the data in that body
part. By allowing the text/enriched interpreter to subsequently change
the character set, perhaps to one completely different from the charset
specified in the Content-type line (with potentially much different
resource requirements), too much burden would be placed on the
text/enriched interpreter itself.

Therefore, if multiple types of non-ASCII characters are desired in a
text/enriched document, one of the following two methods must be used:

  1. For cases where the different types of non-ASCII text can be
     limited to their own paragraphs with distinct formatting, a
     multipart message can be used with each part having a Content-Type
     of text/enriched and a different charset parameter. The one caveat
     to using this method is that each new part must start in the
     initial state for a text/enriched document. That means that all of
     the text/enriched commands in the preceding part must be properly
     balanced with ending commands before the next text/enriched part
     begins. Also, each text/enriched part must begin a new paragraph.

  2. If different types of non-ASCII text are to appear in the same
     line or paragraph, or if text/enriched formatting (e.g. margins,
     typeface, justification) is required across several different
     types of non-ASCII text, a single text/enriched body part should
     be used with a character set specified that contains all of the
     required characters. For example, a charset parameter of
     "UNICODE-1-1-UTF-7" as specified in RFC 1642 could be used for
     such purposes. Not only does UNICODE contain all of the characters
     that can be represented in all of the other registered ISO 8859
     MIME character sets, but UTF-7 is fully compatible with other
     aspects of the text/enriched standard, including the use of the
     "<" character referred to below. Any other character sets that are
     specified for use in MIME which contain different types of
     non-ASCII text can also be used in these instances.

Use of the "<" character in formatting commands

If the character set specified by the charset parameter on the
Content-type line is anything other than "US- ASCII", this means that
the text being described by text/enriched formatting commands is in a
non-ASCII character set. However, the commands themselves are still the
same ASCII commands that are defined in this document. This creates an
ambiguity only with reference to the "<" character, the octet with
numeric value 60. In single byte character sets, such as the ISO-8859
family, this is not a problem; the octet 60 can be quoted by including
it twice, just as for ASCII. The problem is more complicated, however,
in the case of multi-byte character sets, where the octet 60 might
appear at any point in the byte sequence for any of several
characters.

In practice, however, most multi-byte character sets address this
problem internally. For example, the UNICODE character sets can use the
UTF-7 encoding which preserves all of the important ASCII characters in
their single byte form. The ISO-2022 family of character sets can use
certain character sequences to switch back into ASCII at any moment.
Therefore it is specified that, before text/enriched formatting
commands, the prevailing character set should be "switched back" into
ASCII, and that only those characters which would be interpreted as "<"
in plain text should be interpreted as token delimiters in
text/enriched.

The question of what to do for hypothetical future character sets that
do not subsume ASCII is not addressed in this memo.

Minimal text/enriched conformance

A minimal text/enriched implementation is one that converts "<<" to
"<", removes everything between a <param> command and the next
balancing </param> command, removes all other formatting commands (all
text enclosed in angle brackets), and, outside of <nofill>
environments, converts any series of n CRLFs to n-1 CRLFs, and converts
any lone CRLF pairs to SPACE.

Notes for Implementors

It is recognized that implementors of future mail systems will want
rich text functionality far beyond that currently defined for
text/enriched. The intent of text/enriched is to provide a common
format for expressing that functionality in a form in which much of it,
at least, will be understood by interoperating software. Thus, in
particular, software with a richer notion of formatted text than
text/enriched can still use text/enriched as its basic representation,
but can extend it with new formatting commands and by hiding
information specific to that software system in text/enriched <param>
constructs. As such systems evolve, it is expected that the definition
of text/enriched will be further refined by future published
specifications, but text/enriched as defined here provides a platform
on which evolutionary refinements can be based.

An expected common way that sophisticated mail programs will generate
text/enriched data is as part of a multipart/alternative construct. For
example, a mail agent that can generate enriched mail in ODA format can
generate that mail in a more widely interoperable form by generating
both text/enriched and ODA versions of the same data, e.g.:

    Content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary=foo

    --foo
    Content-type: text/enriched

    [text/enriched version of data]
    --foo Content-type: application/oda

    [ODA version of data]
    --foo--

If such a message is read using a MIME-conformant mail reader that
understands ODA, the ODA version will be displayed; otherwise, the
text/enriched version will be shown.

In some environments, it might be impossible to combine certain
text/enriched formatting commands, whereas in others they might be
combined easily. For example, the combination of <bold> and <italic>
might produce bold italics on systems that support such fonts, but
there exist systems that can make text bold or italicized, but not
both. In such cases, the most recently issued (innermost) recognized
formatting command should be preferred.

One of the major goals in the design of text/enriched was to make it so
simple that even text-only mailers will implement enriched-to-
plain-text translators, thus increasing the likelihood that enriched
text will become "safe" to use very widely. To demonstrate this
simplicity, an extremely simple C program that converts text/enriched
input into plain text output is included in Appendix A.

Extensions to text/enriched

It is expected that various mail system authors will desire extensions
to text/enriched. The simple syntax of text/enriched, and the
specification that unrecognized formatting commands should simply be
ignored, are intended to promote such extensions.

An Example

Putting all this together, the following "text/enriched" body
fragment:

    From: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@bellcore.com>
    To: Ned Freed <ned@innosoft.com>
    Content-type: text/enriched

    <bold>Now</bold> is the time for <italic>all</italic>
    good men
    <smaller>(and <<women>)</smaller> to
    <ignoreme>come</ignoreme>

    to the aid of their


    <color><param>red</param>beloved</color>
    country.

    By the way,
    I think that <paraindent><param>left</param><<smaller>

    </paraindent>should REALLY be called

    <paraindent><param>left</param><<tinier></paraindent>
    and that I am always right.

    -- the end

represents the following formatted text (which will, no doubt, look
somewhat cryptic in the text-only version of this document):

    Now is the time for all good men (and <women>) to come
    to the aid of their

    beloved country.
    By the way, I think that
         <smaller>
    should REALLY be called
         <tinier>
    and that I am always right.
    -- the end

where the word "beloved" would be in red on a color display.

Security Considerations

Security issues are not discussed in this memo, as the mechanism raises
no security issues.

Author's Address

For more information, the authors of this document may be contacted via
Internet mail:

                              Peter W. Resnick
                            QUALCOMM Incorporated
                           1009 North Busey Avenue
                            Urbana, IL 61801-1607
                           Phone: +1 217 337 1905
                            FAX: +1 217 337 1905
                        e-mail: presnick@qualcomm.com

                                Amanda Walker
                        InterCon Systems Corporation
                             950 Herndon Parkway
                              Herndon, VA 22070
                           Phone: +1 703 709 5500
                            FAX: +1 703 709 5555
                         e-mail: amanda@intercon.com

Acknowledgements

(In the process of being written)

References

(Full citations will appear in the final draft)
[RFC-1341]
[RFC-1521]
[RFC-1523]
[RFC-1563]
[RFC-1642]
[RFC-1766]
[RFC-1866]

Appendix A--A Simple enriched-to-plain Translator in C

One of the major goals in the design of the text/enriched subtype of
the text Content-Type is to make formatted text so simple that even
text-only mailers will implement enriched-to-plain-text translators,
thus increasing the likelihood that multifont text will become "safe"
to use very widely. To demonstrate this simplicity, what follows is a
simple C program that converts text/enriched input into plain text
output. Note that the local newline convention (the single character
represented by "\n") is assumed by this program, but that special CRLF
handling might be necessary on some systems.

#include <ctype.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

main() {
    int c, i, paramct=0, newlinect=0, nofill=0;
    char token[62], *p;

    while ((c=getc(stdin)) != EOF) {
        if (c == '<') {
            if (newlinect == 1) putc(' ', stdout);
            newlinect = 0;
            c = getc(stdin);
            if (c == '<') {
                if (paramct <= 0) putc(c, stdout);
            } else {
                ungetc(c, stdin);
                for (i=0, p=token;
                     (c=getc(stdin)) != EOF && c != '>';
                     i++) {
                    if (i < sizeof(token)-1) {
                        *p++ = isupper(c) ? tolower(c) : c;
                    }
                }
                *p = '\0';
                if (c == EOF) break;
                if (strcmp(token, "param") == 0)
                    paramct++;
                else if (strcmp(token, "nofill") == 0)
                    nofill++;
                else if (strcmp(token, "/param") == 0)
                    paramct--;
                else if (strcmp(token, "/nofill") == 0)
                    nofill--;
            }
        } else {
            if (paramct > 0)
                ; /* ignore params */
            else if (c == '\n' && nofill <= 0) {
                if (++newlinect > 1) putc(c, stdout);
            } else {
                if (newlinect == 1) putc(' ', stdout);
                newlinect = 0;
                putc(c, stdout);
            }
        }
    }
    /* The following line is only needed with line-buffering */
    putc('\n', stdout);
    exit(0);
}

It should be noted that one can do considerably better than this in
displaying text/enriched data on a dumb terminal. In particular, one
can replace font information such as "bold" with textual emphasis (like
*this* or _T_H_I_S_). One can also properly handle the text/enriched
formatting commands regarding indentation, justification, and others.
However, the above program is all that is necessary in order to present
text/enriched on a dumb terminal without showing the user any
formatting artifacts.

Appendix B--A Simple enriched-to-HTML Translator in C

It is fully expected that other text formatting standards like HTML and
SGML will supplant text/enriched in Internet mail. It is also likely
that as this happens, recipients of text/enriched mail will wish to
view such mail with an HTML viewer. To this end, the following is a
simple example of a C program to convert text/enriched to HTML. Since
the current version of HTML at the time of this document's publication
is HTML 2.0 defined in [RFC-1866], this program converts to that
standard. There are several text/enriched commands that have no HTML
2.0 equivalent. In those cases, this program simply puts those commands
into processing instructions; that is, surrounded by "<?" and ">". As
in Appendix A, the local newline convention (the single character
represented by "\n") is assumed by this program, but special CRLF
handling might be necessary on some systems.

#include <ctype.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

main() {
    int c, i, paramct=0, nofill=0;
    char token[62], *p;

    while((c=getc(stdin)) != EOF) {
        if(c == '<') {
            c = getc(stdin);
            if(c == '<') {
                fputs("&lt;", stdout);
            } else {
                ungetc(c, stdin);
                for (i=0, p=token;
                     (c=getc(stdin)) != EOF && c != '>';
                     i++) {
                    if (i < sizeof(token)-1) {
                        *p++ = isupper(c) ? tolower(c) : c;
                    }
                }
                *p = '\0';
                if(c == EOF) break;
                if(strcmp(token, "/param") == 0) {
                    paramct--;
                    putc('>', stdout);
                } else if(paramct > 0) {
                    fputs("&lt;", stdout);
                    fputs(token, stdout);
                    fputs("&gt;", stdout);
                } else {
                    putc('<', stdout);
                    if(strcmp(token, "nofill") == 0) {
                        nofill++;
                        fputs("pre", stdout);
                    } else if(strcmp(token, "/nofill") == 0) {
                        nofill--;
                        fputs("/pre", stdout);
                    } else if(strcmp(token, "bold") == 0) {
                        fputs("b", stdout);
                    } else if(strcmp(token, "/bold") == 0) {
                        fputs("/b", stdout);
                    } else if(strcmp(token, "italic") == 0) {
                        fputs("i", stdout);
                    } else if(strcmp(token, "/italic") == 0) {
                        fputs("/i", stdout);
                    } else if(strcmp(token, "fixed") == 0) {
                        fputs("tt", stdout);
                    } else if(strcmp(token, "/fixed") == 0) {
                        fputs("/tt", stdout);
                    } else if(strcmp(token, "excerpt") == 0) {
                        fputs("blockquote", stdout);
                    } else if(strcmp(token, "/excerpt") == 0) {
                        fputs("/blockquote", stdout);
                    } else {
                        putc('?', stdout);
                        fputs(token, stdout);
                        if(strcmp(token, "param") == 0) {
                            paramct++;
                            putc(' ', stdout);
                            continue;
                        }
                    }
                    putc('>', stdout);
                }
            }
        } else if(c == '>') {
            fputs("&gt;", stdout);
        } else {
            if(c == '\n' && nofill <= 0 && paramct <= 0) {
                while((i=getc(stdin)) == '\n') fputs("<br>", stdout);
                ungetc(i, stdin);
            }
            putc(c, stdout);
        }
    }
    /* The following line is only needed with line-buffering */
    putc('\n', stdout);
    exit(0);
}