WYSIWYG Text Formatting

July 31, 200223 yr

I sure hope there's a genius out there to help me with this one...

I've got a classified database, producing ads for a newspaper, and I'm trying to work on an efficient way to enter and export these ads to go into Quark. Sure, I know, you're all saying XTags, right? That's what I'm using now, and I have two small problems with it...

First, what if an ad has two paragraphs in it? Well, when Filemaker exports the ad text to a text file, it has to remain all on one line - no carriage returns, so it changes all the carriage returns in the text of the ad to (for some strange reason) column breaks. Now, I've been running a script that will search for these column breaks and replace them with carriage returns, in a seperate apple-scriptable text editor called style, but its kinda slow, and not terribly stable, and I'd frankly rather not have to license this program to every single Mac that might ever export ads.

Problem 2 - I can't give them a wysiwyg interface for ad entry. Instead of seeing the ad as it will be, they see it in Xtag code, as for some evil reason, filemaker doesn't make text styling scriptable (why! WHY!!).

So, I came up with a few ideas.

I thought, first, why not just convert into RTF, instead of Xtags? In RTf I can just insert a tag for new paragraph, so that it can still all output on one line with no carriage returns from FMaker. I could of sworn, though, that it was possible to import RTF's into a Quark doc - I can't find a method for doing so! Plus, it still leaves me with the WYSIWYG issue

So, then, I got really thoughtful, and said - hey! Self! Why not just cut and paste the text via applescript from the database to a text box in Quark? Well, I tried that, manually, to see how it would work, as it seemed the perfect solution - they just have to go in, style their text precisely how they wish, and lo and behold, it should look the same when you copy and paste it, right? Nope, when I copied it into Quark, it lost all formatting: character, paragraph, you name it. Even when I cut and paste into Word, it loses some formatting (For instance, if they've selected All Caps, it doesn't come across).

Thoughts? Feelings? Workarounds? I am working on an exceptionally tight budget, so I can't really afford to do plugins unless they are muy cheap. The WYSIWYG issue isn't AS important, but darnit, it shouldn't be this hard!