Exporting formatted text

[jacobsen]

How do I export text that has been formatted, e.g. bold, italic, underscored and so on? It seems as if there is no export format that will support formatted text. Is there a plug-in that would solve my problem.

Exporting formatted text to a MS Word document would be prefered at this time.

I have FM 4.0.

Thanks in advance.

Henrik

[Vaughan]

"It seems as if there is no export format that will support formatted text."

That is exactly the issue. Export and import work with *data* -- plain ascii text. With most databases, fields usually contain plain text data, the formatting is applied by layouts (or their equivilent). Believe it or not, this offers the most flexibility.

About the only thing you can do is use copy and paste to save the formatting. Export cannot help you. See if you can perform your task from within FMP (maybe by using a customised layout and scripts) rather than relying on exporting to MS Word. There isn't much that you cannot do in FMP!

[jacobsen]

Hi Vaughan.

Thank you for your answer, at least I now know that I didn't overlook some build in export option. I will try to figure out some other way to do it, if it can be done at all...

Henrik

[BobWeaver]

Perhaps you could use calculated fields to insert html formatting tags into the text before you export, and then open the file in Word as an html file.

[Guest]

I am also in need of a way to export data and preserve formatting (font, size, length of each line of text etc). I need to export 1 field for about 200 records. The field varies in size (it contains captions for museum photos and objects) and I haven't figured a way to print it directly from FM. And, as you note, all formatting is lost during EXPORT, no matter what file type one chooses. I can imbed the formatting in the FM record, and using copy and paste to WORD, the formatting is preserved, plus I can edit in WORD to put the required # of blank lines between captions. But that is copy and paste one by one. So I now EXPORT the cation field for all records I want to a WORD merge file, and re-edit the captions in WORD. ugh. I thought maybe I could create a script to copy and paste to a WORD document, but FM doesn't seem to allow one to copy and paste to a non-FM file. Any solutions or suggestions will be most appreciated !!