On Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:45:16 +1000 Jean Lear <[email protected]> dijo:
>I cannot send a copy in the body of this e mail but will try to >describe the layout. >In the top left hand corner of the (business size) card is a logo >which is approx two and a half cm wide by three cm high. >Below that in size 10 font are two lines of words - >'MEMBER 2222 >Membership Expires 2 April 2011' >This leaves the upper right hand part of the card where the mail merge >inserts the members first name on one line and second name on the next >line. With Publisher the text entered with 'Text Best Fit' would allow >the name to be entered to fill the space. The font size would vary >according to the number of letters in the name could be from 48 down >to 24. In OO Writer the font size depends on the longest name in the >merge which applies then to all cards. >Hope you can understand all that. As far as I know, the feature you need does not exist in OOo. However, I thought of a workaround. You could create styles that differ only in the point size of the font. For example, if the font needs to vary from 10 points (for the long names) to 15 points (for the short names), and you want it to vary by half-point increments, you could create ten styles. OOo Writer allows setting styles to different fields during a merge. However, getting it to understand the length of the text in the field it is merging, and applying the correct style for text of that length, might be possible, but the code to get it to work would take a lot of effort. Instead, I would let the merge finish, and then apply the styles with Writer's Find and Replace function. This can be done globally for the entire document, and can be recorded as a macro, so that all you have to do is run the macro each time after the merge. The problem still remains of how to get Writer to recognize the length of the names so the Find and Replace function will apply the correct style. Perhaps someone has a better solution, but I would do it by inserting a number in front of the name in the database. You can probably do this with an SQL statement in the database. For example, my name (John Jordan) is relatively short, so you might want to use the largest font style for my name. If you have defined ten styles, and numbered them 0-9, then I would be a 9. In the database I would appear as 9John and 9Jordan. After the merge your Writer macro would search for "9" and, upon finding it, change the style to "9." At the end of the macro you can do a global Find and Replace to delete all the numbers. As a point of curiosity, what do you do with people who have three or more names? E.g., there are thousands of John Jordans, so I usually use my middle name as well. There are also lots of married people who append their spouse's name, sometimes with a hyphen. And there are other cultures where naming systems are completely different from the traditions of northern Europe. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
