Trouble exporting to file and preserving word wrap

[Gary Childress]

I'm creating an MS Access DB to serve as a journal where I'll be writing about personal experiences and other things. I hope someday to publish parts of it. Just as a test I tried exporting a report into Rich Text format. However, every time I export, the margins of the "memo" fields are all messed up and when I try to adjust the margins in MS Word, then that messes the text lines up. The source of the problem appears to be that in MS Access the "Memo" fields have word wrap, however, when exported they are no longer in word wrap format. The end of each line counts as a hard return. Is there a way around this problem, that anyone knows of?

One thought I had was converting to a PDF and then to a MS Word doc and maybe that would preserve the word wrap. Unfortunately I don't have the ability to convert PDF to a DOC file to test my hypothesis out, though.



Thanks for any help or suggestions.

[JamesDeckert]

Can you post your RTF so I can look at it?

[Gary Childress]

Can you post your RTF so I can look at it?

Thanks for offering to take a look. Everything works, except if I ever want to set my journal up to be published or need to reformat it there would be an enormous amount of work involved in deleting the hard returns and turning it into a paragraph with wrapping text.


Thanks.

[June7]

Best I could do was a search and replace on paragraph mark and tab special characters (^p^t). Replaced with nothing so I end up with one long paragraph with line wrapping.

[Gary Childress]

Best I could do was a search and replace on paragraph mark and tab special characters (^p^t). Replaced with nothing so I end up with one long paragraph with line wrapping.

Thanks June7. I've done that too (do a "find and replace") but take that one entry and multiply it by a few hundred and it becomes a little tedious and difficult to do. I mean I can do it that way but just wish there were an easier way.

[ItsMe]

I have a suggestion that is a far departure from what you are doing today. I would entertain the idea of using both Access and Microsoft Word. The idea being that your journal notes would be stored in Word docs that are stored in a folder somewhere on your hard drive. Access could manage creating, opening, saving, cataloging, etc. your Word docs.

I do not know if this is a feasible approach. It is a method I have used in the past. The only difference being I used external text documents to store what is now considered Memo or Long Text.

[June7]

I don't think there is an easy solution. Access is not a word processor and has very limited text formatting features.

[Gary Childress]

I don't think there is an easy solution. Access is not a word processor and has very limited text formatting features.

I think you are probably right. I'll probably need to make do with the "export to file" function as best I can or else perhaps try to find some third party application out there for journal writing. Thank you for the help, everyone!

[JamesDeckert]

Here's the formatting code between a line
{\fs29\par}}\pard\plain\tx1080{\plain\tab\fs22\f2\ cf2\cb1
Doen't look easy to filter out.
When I opened the rtf in word by double clicking i got the first pic (looking like a poem with weird line breaks)
But when I clicked the enable editing button is created the second formatting. Isn't this what you want?

[June7]

That's what I saw also. But then change the document right margin or edit the text and see what happens to the line endings.

[Gary Childress]

Here's the formatting code between a line
{\fs29\par}}\pard\plain\tx1080{\plain\tab\fs22\f2\ cf2\cb1
Doen't look easy to filter out.
When I opened the rtf in word by double clicking i got the first pic (looking like a poem with weird line breaks)
But when I clicked the enable editing button is created the second formatting. Isn't this what you want?

Hi Mr. Deckert,

Thank you for checking it out. As long as the exported document doesn't need any editing then it is fine. However, as June7 points out, if I have to edit anything in the exported document, changing the length of a line or changing the margins, then problems occur. Then the lines get all out of whack. My understanding is that most publishers want a document in a standard word processor format so they can make their own edits or fit it into the space they need and what not. Getting parts of my journal published someday is sort of an ambition I have. So I'd like to be able to eventually be able to create a manuscript in standard word processing format out of it.

[JamesDeckert]

Yuk, you guys were right about the editing.

Do you need it formatted as RTF? Have you tested with Plain Text to see how that works for you?

[Gary Childress]

Yuk, you guys were right about the editing.

Do you need it formatted as RTF? Have you tested with Plain Text to see how that works for you?

Ideally RTF or something to get it into a Word doc would be preferable. Although, I tried plain text but it came up with pretty much the same issues, each line is a hard return. I also exported to PDF and it came out looking nice but I'm not sure how well it could be edited in Adobe as I don't have Acrobat. I suspect it would run into similar problems there I'm sure.

Such is life I guess. Hopefully by the time I get around to publish there'll be a reasonable work around.

[June7]

Believe me, editing text in an editable OCR PDF is not easy. Much worse than the edits you would have to do in Word. At least that's my experience with it. My exports were tabular in nature, not paragraphs. But I expect will not be any more pleasant with your Access exports.