Solved: Extracting contents from textboxes

[MK_]

Hi all,

I have a huge report exported as a .rtf file with thousands of textboxes (or textframes?). It has not a regular format, i.e. some lines has 3 textboxes (those are the ones witch cointains usefull data), others has just one, and there are some few with shapes (lines) and images.
What I need is to retrieve the contents of those textboxes and paste them as "regular text", I mean, something like "remove the textboxes and insert tab chars within it´s contents".
I´ve already tried to convert the file to .txt but it results in a big mess, since it does not follows the natural order of the text, as it disposes the contents of all second "columns", then the third and at last the first ones.

I´m using MS Word 2003.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[macropod]

Hi MK,

Any automated conversion is going to be problematic when it comes to positioning the extracted text as a textframe's anchor doesn't necessarily relate to where the text appears on the page and working out the relative text positioning for insertion is far from straightforward where multiple columns are involved - and even then, if other text is wrapped around the textframe, working out where the extracted text should go is probably going to be unreliable.

[MK_]

Thanks Macropod.

I´ve made some tests and decided to save the file as .txt and run a small awk script to do what I need.