Alright...

I finally begged and pleaded, and got apportioned enough money to actually buy a plugin for work on my DB. Here's the situation, and I've never actually had to use an external plugin, so I need y'all's advice.

I've got a dbase where my users are entering classified ads for a small newspaper. I want them to be able to format these on screen, to look how they want, then export them into XTags.

I was dissapointed that FMaker had no way to manipulate or test for formatting, but I've gotten over that. The best solution to my quandary I can find is a plugin called diStyler, by Abstrakt, which takes formatted text and exports it to a text file in XTags (perfect! How do they DO that? I wish I could just program a plugin...). But! Unfortunately this plugin pulls the text formatting beautifully, but can't find paragraph formatting. Now, I don't need anything fancy, the only thing I need is to have my users be able to center or justify, that's all. Just centering and justifying, nothing fancy, no line spacing or indent formats or anything. How can I do it? I've been banging my head into a brick wall for hours now, and I can hardly see the screen through the blood, so I'm hoping someone out there has a suggestion.

OPTION A

Is there another plugin out there that will either allow me to manually set text and paragraph formatting with a script, or that will take the formatting presented and export it to some usable form - somethign I can import into Quark? The only plugin that I can find that even affects text formatting, besides the one I'm looking at is Styler, by the same company, which still doesn't do paragraph formatting and which is only available on a mac ( I have to make this cross-platform, I'm 'fraid). So if anyone out there can sell me on a plugin that will either let me apply styling by a script (Therefore letting me build a button that also records where this styling belongs) or else somethign like diStyler that also parses out paragraph formatting (at least center/justify etc.), that would be the number one easiest way out.

OPTION B

Is there some other way to have filemaker test for Centered/Justified? Or to have it display only PART of the text centered or justified, based on an invisible arbitrary character? I bet I can't, after all, that's why I have to get a plugin in the first place - filemaker can't manipulate formatting.

Thanks for any and all help, I really do appreciate it, I'm on a deadline, and I really want this to work.

The MacOS has a lot of built-in functions that recognize and work with a data type called 'styled text' which embeds information about font, size, style (bold, italic etc.), but not actual paragraph formatting (as far as I can tell). I assume that Filemaker and the plug-ins are using the styled text data type for their manipulations, so it may not be possible to access Filemaker's paragraph formatting without the plug-in developer resorting to a lot of extra work.

You are using a calcuation in Filemaker to set up your Xtag text, correct? If so, set up the Xtag calculation so it comes in as style sheet tags instead of regular formatted tags. Then, import them into a Quark template that already has these style sheets set up. You can set your style sheets up with any justification you want.

Hello

I'm not aware of other plugins doing text formatting as you are asking for ...

I once built a system similar to yours and used

A styles.fp5 file in which user could define styles for their Ads, each style containing the XPress header, fixed text, XPress tags and placeholders for FM data

A script later substituted placeholders with data and created a .txt file using the FileToolBox plug-in

Client was very happy, despite no visual feedback