I am new to the forums, but not to FMPro, though It's been some time since I last touched it.

I edit weekly newsletter featuring articles written by others. I compile them and email the doc to a subscription list. For years, I've been running the articles through a text editor to clean them up then C&Ping the into a Word document where I use paragraph styles to format the headlines, bylines, endnotes, etc and to construct a table of contents.

The newsletter is in a three-column layout and each page includes a header and a footer (which are different on the first page). The styles I use are:

- Section Heading

- Title

- Byline info

- Lead-in text

- Body text

- Notes text

I auto-generate ToC from the first two levels of Paragraph Styles.

Word is slow, and I'd like to be able to more easily interact with past issues. A database would be perfect, but I can't figure out how to re-create the sort of layout I'm using now in FMPro.

Any tips? Anyone want to do it for me?

PS: I use Mac OS X.

You could conceivably make each article into a text record in FM (copied from Word), but I think using PDF and Acrobat might be better.

You could conceivably make each article into a text record in FM (copied from Word), but I think using PDF and Acrobat might be better.

What's that supposed to mean? A little too parsimonious.

Well, here's an off the wall suggest. Why not use one of programs that are designed for Newletters, such as QuarkXpress, PageMaker, Ready, Set, Go, (Design Studio), etc.

Lee

Well, I thought I explained why I didn't want to use a desktop publishing application.

I teach Journalism; I am a master with Adobe InDesign. But I want to be able to archive issues, tabulate statistics about articles, etc. I am sorry if I didn't make this clear in the original post, but I know that I want a database. I can build the database myself; that's easy. The difficult part is the layout.

Filemaker can be used to manage your data very well, but it has limitations when it comes to producing word processor style output. There have been a number of recent discussions about using Filemaker to handle the data, and then using its exporting features to send to MS Word etc. Have a look in the Importing & Exporting Forum. Here are a couple of threads:

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=144413&an=0&page=0#144413

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=146745&an=0&page=0#146745

There is a free Adobe InDesign, AppleScript & FileMaker solution. I don't have it, so I can't tell you if/how it works.

http://www.pinecode.nl