trouble saving NSAttributedString, with image, to an RTF file

Question

I have some output that is a very simple RTF file. When I generate this document, the user can email it. All this works fine. The document looks good. Once I have the NSAttribut

Answer 1

Although, RTF does support embedded images on Windows, apparently it doesn't on OS X. RTF was developed by Microsoft and they added embedded images in version 1.5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format#Version_changes). I think that Apple took earlier version of the format and their solution to images in documents was RTFD. Here is what Apple documentation says about RTF:

Rich Text Format (RTF) is a text formatting language devised by Microsoft Corporation. You can represent character, paragraph, and document format attributes using plain text with interspersed RTF commands, groups, and escape sequences. RTF is widely used as a document interchange format to transfer documents with their formatting information across applications and computing platforms. Apple has extended RTF with custom commands, which are described in this chapter.

So no images are mentioned. Finally to prove that RTF doesn't support images on mac, download this RTF document - it will show photo in Windows WordPad and won't show it in OS X TextEdit.

So as Larme mentioned - you should choose RTFD file type when adding attachments. From Wikipedia:

Rich Text Format Directory, also known as RTFD (due to its extension .rtfd), or Rich Text Format with Attachments

Although you will be able to get NSData object that contains both the text and the image (judging by its size), via dataFromRange:documentAttributes:@{NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute: NSRTFDTextDocumentType} error:] you probably won't be able to save it so that it could be opened successfully. At least - I wasn't able to do that.

That's probably because actually RTFD is not a file format - it's a format of a bundle. To check it, you could use TextEdit on your mac to create a new document, add image and a text to it and save it as a file. Then right click on that file and choose Show Package Contents and you'll notice that the directory contains both your image and the text in RTF format.

However you will be able to save this document successfully with this code:

NSFileWrapper *fileWrapper = [imageAttrString fileWrapperFromRange:NSMakeRange(0, [imageAttrString length]) documentAttributes:@{NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute: NSRTFDTextDocumentType} error:&error];
[fileWrapper writeToURL:yourFileURL options:NSFileWrapperWritingAtomic originalContentsURL:nil error:&error];

Because apparently NSFileWrapper knows how to deal with RTFD documents while NSData has no clue of what it contains.

However the main problem still remains - how to send it in email? Because RTFD document is a directory not a file, I'd say it's not very well suited for sending by email, however you can zip it and send with an extension .rtfd.zip. The extension here is the crucial because it will tell Mail app how to display contents of the attachment when user taps on it. Actually it will work also in Gmail and probably other email apps on iOS because it's the UIWebView that knows how to display .rtfd.zip. Here is a technical note about it: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/qa/qa1630/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40008749

So the bottom line is - it can be done but the RTFD document will be an attachment to the email not the email content itself. If you want to have it as an email content you should probably look into embedding your image into HTML and sending the mail as HTML.