Pasting from FileMaker

[bdam]

Kind of an odd issue that I'm wondering if anyone has come up against here.

The process:

Paste some bulleted text from MS Word into FileMaker field.

Paste from FileMaker to our Website.

Unfortunately our website's (not my domain) admin section only works in IE. When pasting something bulleted it changes the bullets to yen signs.

Example:

Word Text: • This is a bulleted item.

In FileMaker:• This is a bulleted item.

Copied from FM to text area in IE: ¥ This is a bulleted item.

If I skip the FileMaker step it works just fine:

Copied from Word to text area in IE:· This is a bulleted item.

So while part of it could be blamed on IE it's specific to FileMaker. If I copy the text from just about any other program it will paste fine no matter what.

[Genx]

Well the thing about FM is its a database, not a word processor.

If you want your html to show properly you should probably use

[*]Your Item

I'm pretty sure it won't nativley convert this sort of stuff properly, especially given that MS word adds a whole bunch of ... bad things ... to its docs -- i.e. a heck of a lot of xml.

Try using a different editor to generate the bullet and pasting that -- In fact try copy the text from IE to FM and then posting that.

[bdam]

Yea, I hear ya on the word processor bit. I personally wish FM didn't store _any_ formatting.

The problem with using actual HTML tags is that we need to use the same fields for other things where the tags would be out of place.

We would have to enter the data with HTML tags and have a calculation field that removes them and formats the text correctly. I can think my way through the first part, removing the tags. However, I can't think how I would bold, italicize, or underline the text between the tags.

So we would need it both ways

[*]Book Title, Author

• Book Title, Author

EDIT:

Also, the calculation would have to put smart quotes and em and en dashes back in where appropriate. Now that's something I really don't have any idea how to do.

Alternatively, we could enter the formatted text and create a calculation that adds the html tags but I'm not sure how to find the text and add appropriate tags.

Edited June 5, 2007 by Guest

[Genx]

I personally wish FM didn't store _any_ formatting.

Well, you could always paste special ...

[bdam]

Yea, I looked at that but when I paste special from MS Word it just labels it as unformatted text.

EDIT

... ah, OK now I get it. So I did that and it pretty much pasted the same way but minus the bold, italics, or underline of course. Still, when I copied that from FM to the website admin area it replaced the bullets with Yen signs.

Do you know what the default character set is for FileMaker?

Edited June 5, 2007 by Guest

[Genx]

Could try this CF: http://www.briandunning.com/cf/591

[bdam]

Thanks for the help GenX. I'm working with the GetAsCSS() function and we'll see if our website and xml exports can use those. If not, the function might be a good jumping point for a custom function: http://www.briandunning.com/cf/709