Helen,
at the cost of drifting OT...

> It's a common misconception that a RichEdit component is a richtext editor.

it may be so common because it's true. :-) As the name implies,
TCustomRichEdit *is* a rich text editor.

> This is not the case. The TIB_RichEdit is a custom memo component that recognises standard rich text markup and will properly display it as richtext. Without accessing an editor (home-built or through a richtext editor component or an ole provider such as MS Word) you can't use the RichEdit component to convert plain text to RTF.

Almost correct. TIB_RichEdit is able to do what you say, but
-it has nothing to do with a memo component, in the sense of Windows
class.
-it is also able to add formatting. Just have a look at SelAttributes.

> IBO's custom memo components *can* handle varchars, so if you can find a way to store RTF-marked-up text in a varchar, TIB_RichText ought to be able to display it correctly. I don't know if it is even possible to save a varchar containing the whole range of non-text characters used for RTF markup...

The RTF format uses only printable characters. It's a text format (as
opposed to a binary format - which BTW you would be able to save to a
varchar column too, if you used the right character set).

Finally, I agree that a (text) blob is a much more ideal candidate to
store rich text data, expecially if the length is variable.
Ciao
--
____
_/\/ando