

\line designates a soft return, otherwise known as a line break. This would be the second paragraph in the documentline This is the body text, and this is bold Ā. Control words begin with a backslash and are usually delimited with a space character following and groups are enclosed by (thanks to John Paul Fullerton for digging up this link)Īn RTF file consists of unformatted text, control words, control symbols and groups. I probably could have worked from that, but I prefer to have a reference to fall back on to understand what a lot of the cryptic rtf code was saying.Ī complete copy of the rtf specifications is available at:

Then I exported a sample file from PageMaker as an rtf document to use as a guide. We had the standard heading, subhead, body and rule styles. In PageMaker we created the columns and layout elements, then the various text styles (using style sheets) for paragraph blocks.
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Of course, whenever I'm dealing with any type of automated publishing task, I prefer to design the page in the end product' and then figure out how to achieve that result using the tools at hand. Final tweaks to columns would of course have to be done in the PageMaker layout. The goal was to get the system to a point where publishing the formatted data to PageMaker was just a mouse click away. Knowing that FileMaker could output pretty much whatever I want via a tab separated export, and using a similar technique for generating static html documents (see issue 15 and 17), I figured that I could teach FileMaker to export an rtf formatted text file so that we can specify character level formatting as well as style sheet information prior to the document hitting PageMaker. So a merger of FileMaker Pro and PageMaker as a package solution was required. Yet a database doesn't have the layout power behind it to do the job alone either.

Needless to say, organizing advertisements that are sorted by various categories within PageMaker would have been time consuming and costly. The task at hand was to create a publishing database solution to help a local publisher automate its classified style advertisements.
