RTFtext, printing and tabStops

[Jan Schenkel]

--- Shari <shari at gypsyware.com> wrote:
> 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,

What I meant was not using the 'Mail Merge' function
that ships with Word, but to effectively :
- make an RTF document with [[expression]] tags as
placeholders for the actual data
- read that file into a Rev variable
- use the Rev 'merge' function on that variable to
replace the [[expression]] tags with the data
- write the resulting content to a file on disk
- open that file in Word using the 'launch' command.

Whether or not you supply the RTF template or let your
users roll their own templates, is up to you.

If all your customers have Word installed (and most
users do have it in one way or another) then you might
as well re-use that as templating and printing engine.

Just my two cents,

Jan Schenkel.

Quartam Reports & PDF Library for Revolution
<http://www.quartam.com>

=====
"As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time."  (La Rochefoucauld)