Hi

FMP 11 mac and win



the requirement is to send email with formatted text, the text needs to
be capable of copy/paste from the email, with preservation of the format
the fields for the output are calculated into a global, field 'titles'
in bold, field content as plain text

Export field contents, and several other variations, anything involving
the clipboard loses the format
A save as pdf preserves the appearance of the bold formatting, but when
the text is copied, and pasted, the carriage returns are lost.

A plugin is not an option due to the cost in a distributed solution

Is there an approach that can preserve the (bold) formatting, and the
correct pilcrows?

In article <4c0ceeec$0$14136$c3e8da3 (AT) news (DOT) astraweb.com>, 105
<cortical (AT) internode (DOT) on.net> wrote:

You could try emailing directly from FileMaker.

The problem is that email is meant to be plain text. Emails that use fancy
fonts, font formatting , images, etc. are really HTML code.

To get a "fancy" email you could try making a Calculation field that
creates HTML code ... but that may be difficult if the user is the one
setting bold fonts, etc. Test it first with a simple calculated HTML to
make sure that works with your email application.


Helpfull Harry )

On 8/06/10 10:45 AM, Your Name wrote:

Hi Harry

I was thinking about the html approach, the bold is only for the title
at the beginning of each calculated line
NAME: ....
DOB: ...

so not a user specified element


I have discovered an improbable workaround
adding 2 pilcrow characters instead of 1 to the concatenation calc as
per:


TextStyleAdd ( "Report ID: " ; Bold) & Melanoma::melanoma_id & "¶¶" &
TextStyleAdd ( "Given name: " ; Bold) & Melanoma::s1_01_given_names &
"¶¶" &
TextStyleAdd ( "Family name: " ; Bold)& Melanoma::s1_01_family_name & "¶¶" &

etc

// and here
TextStyleAdd ( "Requesting doctor name: " ; Bold) &
Melanoma::requesting_doctor_name & "¶" &
TextStyleAdd ( "Requesting doctor phone: " ; Bold) &
Melanoma::requesting_doctor_phone_number & "¶¶" &


this produces a double line spacing in the pdf, but copy and paste of
the pdf content, pastes into a text editor (TextEdit, OpenOffice)
preserving the bold formatting and produces single line spacing


HOWEVER
if a second pilcrow is included in the ONE line following // and here
Melanoma::requesting_doctor_name & "¶¶" &

the whole line spacing is lost after copy/paste, and the text preserves
bold , but looks like a run on paragraph.


So the whole putput either works or falls over, based on one character

This one I can not guess at.

"105" <cortical (AT) internode (DOT) on.net> wrote

That makes it fairly easy to generate HTML code then.
i.e.
<b>Name: </b> Fred Flinstone<br>

But it depends on the email applciation whether or not that will work.



All sorts of weird things happen inside PDFs. (

It could be a bug in the PDF reading application you're using. If you're
using Mac OS X's Preview, try using Adobe's Acrobat Reader (or vice versa)
and see if the same thing happens.

Or perhaps try generating the PDF in a different way.


Helpfull Harry )