Outputting to text

[ian99]

I have a database which I want to use to produce what's on listings. Essentially there are three fields that matter: The town where the gig is taking place, the type of performance and a description of the act. I want to import the records into quark in one stream already tagged up. I have no problem tagging the content. But I can't seem to get the correct output: I want each town to appear as a separate title, followed by a listing of all the acts sorted by the type of performance, so all the comedy gigs are listed together, followed by arts exhibitions etc. I can get a preview of what I want and print it. But what I want is the preview as a pure text stream. In effect, I want to print to file, but can't. Can anyone help?

[ November 02, 2001: Message edited by: IanWilson ]

[sgoethner]

to my knowledge you cann't. I haven't been down this path for awhile (a couple of years), but . . . the subsummary feature in the layout supresses the town and category from printing repeatedly. the problem is, they really are there for each record. so when you export the data the town and category are repeated. 2 options: use the full version of acrobat and what you see in preview can be created into a pdf or use excel as an intermediate step if you must go to XPress. excel allows you to clean up the data quickly because of the columns. good luck

[BobWeaver]

While you can't print to a text file, you can certainly export to a text file. I would be very surprised if there isn't some way to set up what you want. Since I'm not familiar with what Quark expects to get, can you provide some more details about what fields you are trying to export?

[macavity]

I'm having the same problem exporting a summary and wondered whether you've since found a solution.

It's not a Quark problem as such: the text file created invariably contains only the information from the first record of each group.

Is there perhaps a helpful plug-in?

XML is an alternative - but, again, the problem isn't the tags, it's the text file itself.

[spb]

I'm having the same problem exporting a summary and wondered whether you've since found a solution.

This has similarities to a problem I had discussed in another thread. Essentially, I needed to export different numbers of fields from record to record. My solution is to concatenate all fields needed by a given record, then export just that field. Let FM do the assembly work before export. in this case, we are exporting subsummary header & detail fields for the first record, then only the detail fields for the next few. Different numbers of fields for different records.

You could build a concatenation field that contains your subsummary field and all the listed fields. You can script this by making a list layout that displays only the needed fields, go to this layout in the script, Copy All Records (this will put on the clipboard every field of every found record on that layout, whether visible onscreen or not--meaning they need to be scrolled to come into view). Then the script goes to a layout with a single big global text field and pastes the results into that. This is the multikey process.

Now you could have your script go to your working Quark export layout, make a new record, Set a Quark export text field to the global. This will get everything that needs listing in there, and you could include steps that place the subsummary header field in first, and adds the Quark tags to the lines as needed. Now export just this one new record and just this field. It should come right into Quark with formatting applied.

Making a new record for each subsummary header field needed (and grabbing this field's associated list) is key, I think. You could find & delete these records when you're done exporting.

steve brown

[spb]

I just thought of a much simpler solution. The problem is you have, say, ten records and you want a single header. Yet the header field must export with each record. Is it possible to set up a Quark tag that will essentially ignore the text it is attached to? Perhaps define the text with a leading of zero, a font size of zero, and font color of white. Then set up a conditional calculation field: If this is the first record after sort, use Q-tag header & HeaderField else use Q-tag zero & Headerfield. This way the header would export with every record, but would only show itself in Quark above the first record in the list. This would make for a dirty quark doc, with a tiny little invisible batch of text for each record, but if you are just printing the result yourself, it shouldn't matter. If you are sending the file to a printer to create negatives for offset printing, it could be a problem.

I don't know if this is even possible, but it might give you some ideas for clever use of Quark tags instead of elaborate FM concatenations.

Steve Brown