Problem displaying Word 2002 RTF files in JEditorPane

Question

Hi all,
I am having a problem displaying RTF files created in Word 2002/Office XP in a JEditorPane.
Our code, which does the usual stuff:
JEditorPane uiViewNarrativeEda = new JEditorPane();
uiViewNarrativeEda.setContentType(new RTFEditorKit().getContentType());
FileInputStream inDocument = new FileInputStream("c:/temp/testing.rtf"); uiViewNarrativeEda.read(inDocument, "");
inDocument.close();
works just FINE with RTF files created in Word 97, WordPad etc, but it seems that Word 2002 adds some tags to the RTF file that the RTFReader cannot handle.
For example, I believe the following exception is due to the new \stylesheet section that Word 2002 adds to the RTF file:
java.lang.NullPointerException:
     at javax.swing.text.rtf.RTFReader$StylesheetDestination$StyleDefiningDestination.close(RTFReader.java:924)
     at javax.swing.text.rtf.RTFReader.setRTFDestination(RTFReader.java:254)
     at javax.swing.text.rtf.RTFReader.handleKeyword(RTFReader.java:484)
     at javax.swing.text.rtf.RTFParser.write(RTFParser.java, Compiled Code)
     at javax.swing.text.rtf.AbstractFilter.readFromReader(AbstractFilter.java:111)
     at javax.swing.text.rtf.RTFEditorKit.read(RTFEditorKit.java:129)
     at javax.swing.text.JTextComponent.read(JTextComponent.java:1326)
     at javax.swing.JEditorPane.read(JEditorPane.java:387)
Does anyone have similar problems or knows how I could get around this?
I thought about writing a parser that replaces the \stylesheet section with one that works but that seems a lot of work and it does not always work (I tried that by copying and pasting...).
Maybe I could replace the RTF converter that Word 2002 is using with another one - but how?

Answer 1

Hello again,
I found out that the 2002 version of MS Word writes a lot more of data into the file than e.g. Wordpad does.
There is one section that causes the problem, its called "\stylesheet".
My workaround (working in my case) is to wrap the input stream of the RTF document and remove this section (only in memory).
See example implementation:
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< SOURCE CODE<<<<<<<<<<<<<
* Copyright 2004 DaimlerChrysler TSS.
* All Rights Reserved.
* Last Change $Author: wiedenmann $
* At $Date: 2004/03/31 11:08:54CEST $.
package com.dcx.tss.swing;
import java.io.*;
* This class provides a workaround for parse errors in the
* {@link javax.swing.text.rtf.RTFEditorKit}. These errors are caused
* by new format specification for RichTextFormat (RTF V1.7).<br>
* <br>
* The workaround is to filter out a section of the RFT document
* which causes an exception during parsing it. This section has no
* impact on the display of the document, it just contains some
* meta information used by MS Word 2002.<br>
* The whole document will be loaded into memory and then the section
* will be deleted in memory, there is no affect to the document
* directly (on file system).<br>
* <br>
* <i>This workaround is provided without any warranty of completely solving
* the problem.</i>
* @version $Revision: 1.1 $
* @author Wiedenmann
public class RtfInputStream extends FilterReader {
/** Search string for start of the section. */
private static final String SEC_START = "{\\stylesheet";
/** Search string for end of the section. */
private static final String SEC_END = "}}";
/** Locale store for the document data. */
private final StringBuffer strBuf = new StringBuffer();
* Wrapper for the input stream used by the RTF parser.<br>
* Here the complete document will be loaded into a string buffer
* and the section causes the problems will be deleted.<br>
* <br>
* @param in Stream reader for the document (e.g. {@link FileReader}).
* @throws IOException in case of I/O errors during document loading.
public RtfInputStream( final Reader in ) throws IOException {
super( in );
int numchars;
final char[] tmpbuf = new char[2048];
// read the whole document into StringBuffer
do {
numchars = in.read( tmpbuf, 0, tmpbuf.length );
if ( numchars != -1 ) {
strBuf.append( tmpbuf, 0, numchars );
} while ( numchars != -1 );
// finally delete the problem making section
deleteStylesheet();
* Deletion of the prblematic section.
private void deleteStylesheet() {
// find start of the section
final int start = strBuf.indexOf( SEC_START );
if ( start == -1 ) {
// section not contained, so just return ...
return;
// find end of section
final int end = strBuf.indexOf( SEC_END, start );
// delete section
strBuf.delete( start, end + 2 );
* Read characters into a portion of an array.<br>
* The data given back will be provided from local StringBuffer
* which contains the whole document.
* @param buf Destination buffer.
* @param off Offset at which to start storing characters -
* <srong>NOT RECOGNIZED HERE.</strong>.
* @param len Maximum number of characters to read.
* @return The number of characters read, or -1 if the end of the
* stream has been reached
* @exception IOException If an I/O error occurs
public int read( final char[] buf, final int off, final int len ) throws IOException {
if ( strBuf.length() == 0 ) {
// if buffer is empty end of document is reached
return -1;
// fill destination array
int byteCount = 0;
for (; byteCount < len; byteCount++) {
if ( byteCount == strBuf.length() ) {
// end reached, stop filling
break;
// copy data to destination array
buf[byteCount] = strBuf.charAt( byteCount );
// delete to copied data from local store
strBuf.delete( 0, byteCount + 1 );
return byteCount;
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Integration of the warpper looks like:
RtfInputStream inDocument = new RtfInputStream( new FileReader("test.rtf"));
Document doc = rtf.createDefaultDocument();
rtf.read(inDocument, doc, 0 );
Hope this helps - for me it did :-)
Timo Wiedenmann
DaimlerChrysler TSS, Germany