On Sun, 14 Sep 2008 07:21:55, James Hurley
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is a new area for me, but I'm sure it is a common task for many
of you.
I have a mail merge job for a local election.
I have generated all the data in RR for the letter, i.e. the label
and the greeting for the letter from the election data base. (This
greeting is a little complicated and that's where RR comes in. It is
necessary to construct a greeting for the household, a household
which may contain several people and some with different last names.
Anyway Rev is good at that part.)
Is there a convenient way to do the merging of this data with the
letter in RR or should I just export the data to File Maker and
construct the letter there?
In RR would you store the data and the text of the letter in
variables, putting them together to construct the text for the field
and then revprintfield in a repeat loop, one loop for each letter? Is
this very slow? I have a lot of letters to do.
And how can one deal with the formatting, for example center the
addressee's name and address at the top of the field, RR allows only
alignment for the entire field?
Thanks,
Jim Hurley
What I do is the following:
Create a substack "printLetter" with a header field ("pHdr") at the
top of the card window and a text field ("pText") below it. Set the
textAlign of the header field to center and the textAlign of the text
field to left. Put your boilerplate text in a custom property of the
text field, complete with dummy placeholders like <salutation>,
<greeting>, etc. For printing, open the printletter stack invisibly,
put the boilerplate text into the field from the customProp, replace
"<salutation>" with your script-generated salutation in fld "pText",
replace "<greeting>" in fld "pText" with your custom greeting for
that household, etc., ie, customize the text wherever you need by
using the replace command on established placeholders. Then print the
card. Most of your time setting this up will be getting the geography
right so it prints the right size and place on the paper -- look at
the "print card [from topLeft to rightBottom] [into pageRect]"
command. Make sure your fields have no visible borders and the
fillcolor in your printLetter stack is white. You can even get fancy
and have a logo or other image at the top with your header.
If you have more than one page per letter, it's a little more
complex. You basically have to roll your own here (presuming you want
to have pages >=2 have no header), but it's not all that hard. You
hide the header field for pages >=2 and adjust the height of the text
field, then scroll repeatedly (there's another way, too). Note that a
field without scrollbars still scrolls if you script it to do so.
Re speed -- whatever you do in rev will be much faster that your
printer can handle.
hope this helps,
-- Peter
Peter M. Brigham
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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