** Reply to message from "David M. Blocker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on
Sun, 12 Jun 2005 20:25:40 -0400

David, thanks for your reply.

> Is there a reason you can't output to PDF file, which I'm sure Adobe
> Framemaker can read?

The RBase output needs some editing before it's ready for FrameMaker, and while
it's possible to use the Acrobat touchup text tool to do this, it's much too
cumbersome.  I need the ability to do global changes, etc.  (There are some
other workflow issues which make PDF impractical here; among other things, the
current FrameMaker workflow expects to see an ascii MML (Maker Markup Language)
file.)

> Is this email Razzak sent to you on April 30 [regarding Print to Text File 
> setup] relevant?

I've spent a bit of time asking myself that very question, and the answer
unfortunately seems to be no.  The workflow requires the data to be put down
line by line, as I've defined it in the report.  What the Print to Text fixed
length setting does, so far as I can tell, is put the data down side by side. 
So what the report defines as two detail lines:

Data_A
Data_B

gets output as a single text line, with the space between the two elements
determined by Data_A's fixed length:

Data_A           Data_B

The other two options, comma or tab delimited, are definitely not the answer.

If there was a way to specify newlines in the Print to Text File setup, that
might work.  But so far as I can see, that's not an option here.  Each report
section gets a new line, but there is no provision for new lines within a
section.

I should mention too that in Print to Text File setup, the controls in each
report section are shown only as Label1, Label11, Label3, etc. so there's the
added labor of figuring out which report element is Level1 etc. in addition to
making sure that all the fixed length values are proper.   The maintenance of
all this would be a fertile source of error.  (I've got about a dozen of these
to set up, and some are quite complex.)

It was all so much easier in RB DOS . . . Razzak, we need a "Database
Publishing Output" option!

Tom Hawley
New York
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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