Asking for a friend...

A customer is asking to merge a custom form they have with our software - to basically just print some basic demographic information on the first few lines.

They supplied me with the .RTF (word format i believe?).

What process would you recommend to get the file into the //IMAGE option? I was thinking to just to a screen capture to a .png but that doesn't seem elegant or straight forward, plus it would probably resize everything. Is there a way to funnel the printer output to a BMP or PNG?

TIA (from a friend...)

If it's RTF you can probably use //XTEXT to embed. You can also use MX_GDICALC to determine what the //XTEXT coordinates are.

I would agree that using //XTEXT and MX_GDICALC is probably a good way to go. In fact, you might want to use the //XMDATA and //XMFIELDS directives to create a merge driven by the location of variables embedded in the RTF rather than by XY positioning (and thus would adjust even after changing the layout of the RTF).

But if you prefer turning the RTF into an image, there are lots of image printing drivers around. (Load the RTF into Word and then print to an image pseudo-printer.) If you can't find one, send me your RTF and I'll print it to PNG using the Snagit driver.

Thanks for the replies.

I didn't realize //xtext could read native rtf files.. that seems like a good start, and if i cant get it, i appreciate your offer Jack to pipe them into a PNG.

I will read up on the //xtext usage and the other commands that were referenced above.

Followup:

Was able (with some assistance - tx Jack) to get the .rtf file loaded by //xtext.

Thanks again for the suggestions.