RTFtext, printing and tabStops

[Shari]

Jan,

They do not know how to do mail merge in Word.  I had originally set 
this project up as an Excel spreadsheet which exported info for 
import into Word, but it was so convoluted and prone to user error 
(Excel doesn't have the power Rev does, especially with several 
spreadsheets tying into each other) that I convinced them to let me 
do this in Rev.  I knew Rev could do it so much cleaner, with more 
error checking, and more power under the hood, and a LOT more 
capability than Excel.

The sell points were:

User friendly
One click functions (such as printing something and avoiding the 
whole mail merge thing)
Built in error checking
Efficiency

And I don't recall the other sell points but there were several :-)

What's being printed is a variety of things, some are letters, some 
are reports with tables (hence the difficulty with the tabstops), 
some are lists.  The users do not ever create templates, those are 
all built into it (by me).  I had thought it would be nice if the 
templates were somewhat editable but after seeing the difficulty in 
template-to-printing, decided they cannot be.  I may "hide" them in 
the app for this reason.

Shari


>Hi Shari,
>
>Now that you've figured out most of the answers to
>your problems, the following comes to mind:
>- Revolution's rtfText supports only a subset of the
>RTF specification (to be more precise, it takes what
>it can provide with its own field rendering system and
>tries to kindly morph the rest into it)
>- Maybe it's better to use Word as your printing
>vehicle: let the user save a Word file as an RTF file,
>use that as a template for 'merging' the actual data
>into it, and then open the resulting output with Word,
>and send it to the printer
>- Presumably you're using Revolution to 'preview' the
>letter before printing, and at that point you might as
>well automatically open the file in Word and let the
>user tweak things if they want to, and hit the 'print'
>button in Word.
>
>If I find the time to do a follow-up article for the
>RevUp Newsletter, I'll write up how to automate Word
>for this sort of thing. Merge is also fun when applied
>to AppleScript, VBScript and the like :-)
>
>Jan Schenkel.


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