We only recently started using Tessitura's Acknowledgement Letter utility and we have some working letter formats but have some issues when embedding computed data fields into the text. For many letters we have tax information listed at the bottom that uses computed fields such as donation amount and date. These fields are embedded in the text of the letter here and the spacing is sometimes off but never enough to cause any issues, since date and dollar amounts usually don't deviate a lot. However, now we are being asked to include Creditor and Creditee name in this text for gift distributions from foundations or IRAs. The size of these fields can vary widely and I'm not sure how to dynamically size the computed fields so that it doesn't overflow the text box or leave a huge empty space. I've tried looking through Sybase's documentation but sometimes its a bit lacking or hard to find what you need.
If anyone else has dealt with this, some pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Jesse,
The behavior you're describing is normal for Infomaker; it doesn't handle paragraphs of text (just single lines) and thus it does not elegantly reflow blocks of text in situations like this. Some organizations work around this by leaving the paragraph text static, and putting dynamic information onto separate lines that can be displayed or hidden depending on the data.
Since you are just getting started, I'd strongly recommend using Word to manage your acknowledgment letters for a few reasons. It doesn't require any special programs or coding to set up initially, and you and the end users will have a much easier time making changes down the road. Also, as you probably know, Infomaker is currently supported and will be in v16 as well, but we have long-term plans to stop supporting it for custom development. And speaking of v16, at the moment we are planning to introduce emailed contribution acknowledgments using HTML templates in v16, so if that's something you'd like to move to long term, it might be better to use Word until that is available.
We have a really great video tutorial on acknowledgments. Part 3 demonstrates the Word merge process.
-Michael