Export formatted text from calculation

[Mark Turner]

Two issues:

1) I want to retain text formatting (underlining) on individual words and phrases applied in a text field when that field is concatenated with others in a calculated text field. Is there a way to do it in FM6?

2) I want to retain that word-level text formatting when I export the calculated text field. The exported text will be opened in MSWord.

I picked up in another thread, "Output report as a file??" that it's possible to insert RTF formatting codes to format each record. I haven't tried it yet, but the example looked pretty straight-forward. But I don't know that the RTF code technique will help with the word-level formatting.

In case it makes any difference, the project is a manuscript for a book, with 1220 records to be formatted and exported. Redoing the text formatting in MSWord will be extremely tedious if I have to do it that way. The publisher has very specific requirements for the way the MSWord manuscript is formatted and delivered. I've gotten everything but the individual word formatting working by creating a big text calculation field that concatenates the contents of several other fields with formatting codes.

I read in another thread that FM7 doesn't strip text formatting in calculation fields, but this isn't the time (while overdue on a deadline) to migrate to the new version.

Thanks for your help.

-- Mark Turner

[Vaughan]

1) The FMP6 text engine does not honor character or paragraph formatting, it gets lost in the calculation. Character formatting (at least) is kept in FMP 7 though.

2) In general, only *data* is ever exported. Data is text-only ASCII, no formatting at all. So you cannot get the character level formatting out via a standard export either. However if the underline was encoded with HTML or perhaps RTF (or some other formatting mark-up system that uses plain text ASCII characters) then yes the formatting can be exported.

There was a thread about a year ago where somebody wanted to get character formatted text out of an FMP 6 database, and the general consensus was that it'd have to be a cut and paste process.

[BobWeaver]

You can add rtf tags to individual words, but if the text has already been manually formatted in the text field, there is no way to detect and tag the format using a Filemaker calculation. So you would have to manually go through all the text and search for individual formatting and replace it with the appropriate tags. Not very practical. Switching to FM7 might be the correct solution in this case.

[Mark Turner]

Thanks, Vaughn and Bob. It's not the answer I wanted to read, but expected. I'll try Bob's rtf trick for the fields that have consistent formatting, but am resigned to manually redoing the individual word formatting after exporting to the word processor.

-- Mark Turner