After catalog merge where items are different heights...

[Oceaneer]

It would be nice if I could get the text boxes to 'autoflow' or snap together
when I resize textboxes. In other words, after a catalog merge, some
descriptions are shorter than others. So, when I go to one of the short
descriptions and shrink the height of its textbox, I am left with a big gap.
Any way to have the following textboxes snap up to the bottom of the previous
textbox? This would seem to be a serious shortcoming of Publisher. In HTML,
for instance, DIVs stack on top of each other.

The other option would be to allow the catalog merge to spew the entire
formatted contents out into a single textbox or text flow of some sort. It
looks like I will have to try to do some sort of merge into Word to get all
of the text together so I can then laboriously copy and paste one large text
stream into publisher. I am trying to make a fund raiser brochure for an
auction (a catalog of auction items).

Any suggestions? Thanks!

 

[Mary Sauer]

In step 5 (2003) or step 3 (2007) create new publication. You can edit the
results and change the text boxes and/or page setup.

 

[Oceaneer]

Yes, I can change the textboxes but that changes the height for all of them
when the catalog is generated. I am talking about after the catalog is
generated and the pages full of info are created. At that point I may have,
on a single page, one item with a 5 sentence description followed by an item
with a single sentence description followed by another with an 8 sentence
description. I want the third item to slide up. Is that possible? If not, I
will keep looking for a professional publishing package that can do this
simple task.

Thanks for your help.

 

[Mary Sauer]

This is exactly why I suggested to merge to a new publication. You can manually
change the size of your text boxes, rearrange the product pictures. It will not
do it automatically. What you set in the catalog block is what you get in the
merge.
Have you looked into Word's merge?

 

[Oceaneer]

Thank you, Mary. This is exactly what I was afraid of. I don't know if you
have ever made a catalog of any length at all with varying descrption lengths
but any type of manual editing is completely out of the question. We're
talking about 50-100 pages of moving around and re-sizing the little text
boxes. Or you settle for big gaps in the pages.

The solution will be that I will generate one continuous stream of formatted
information and paste it all into one textbox like a Quark or other page
making software would produce. Then all I will have to worry about are
page/column breaks.

Thanks again.