Merge Document/Compose emails--photo disappears.

[SchoodicMountain]

Dear Forum,

I could use some help with a Merge Document/Compose emails problem.

Everything works well when it is just text.

Everything works well when there is a photo and the output is "Save a Single File."

However, when there is a photo and the output is "Compose Emails," then the text is fine and instead of a photo there is a little dotted box with "OBJ" inside.

I'm out of ideas.

Template and csv files attached. (Both stripped down to meet maximum file size,

Many thanks. Many blessings,

Mitchell

[adryan]

G'day, Mitchell et al

It would be years since I've used Mail Merge in NWP, but I thought I'd have a look anyway.

I presume your OBJ icon is showing in Mail. I see no such icon. When posting questions to the forum, it's important people specify the operating system they're using, the better to facilitate the troubleshooting process.

I wonder whether the problem lies with Mail. I find I have inconsistent results when attaching files to Mail messages. Even after fiddling with Mail menu options, attachments often fail to appear in messages. Eventually they "stick", but I've been unable to discern what the trick is. I'm not sure whether this is peculiar to the macOS version I'm using. After all these years, Apple Mail should be rock-solid. But Mail can't even remember the column widths you set in the Viewer Window!

Maybe you could remove sensitive data and post a screenshot of the document showing where the OBJ icon occurs — just to narrow things down a bit.

Cheers,
Adrian

[SchoodicMountain]

Thanks for your assistance.

I'm using Nisus 3.4.1 on a M2 MacBook with Sequoia 15.6.1.

Two Screen Shots attached. The one with the photo s what the document looks like in Nisus and with the Output set to Save Many Files. The other one is what it looks like when the Output is Compose Email. The photo size is 420 Kb. I've tried it with a smaller sized photo and the results are the same.

Many thanks.

Mitchell

[adryan]

G'day, Mitchell et al

Thanks for those, Mitchell. I'm probably not going to be able to help you much more with this, given that you're running Sequoia and I'm on Ventura.

But I observe that copying the contents of the NWP document and simply pasting them into the body of a Mail message preserves the image in its proper position, whereas using Mail's Paste and Match Style command results in a pair of parentheses where the image should be (and where the OBJ box occurs on your computer). I interpret this as meaning that NWP's Compose Email command uses the latter Paste mechanism.

Ideally, Nisus would amend the behavior, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that score. One of our Macro gurus may be able to provide a workaround. Or maybe an AppleScript solution is called for. If I were to pursue this last approach, I'd be looking more closely at that OBJ box. I'd double-click on it and see what happened, and I'd Control-click on it and see what appeared in any drop-down menu that materialized.

Cheers,
Adrian

[Þorvarður]

Hello Mitchell, Adrian and others

I'm on High Sierra, and I have the same problem.

Though instead of seeing a box with "OBJ" inside, I only see a blank space where the image is supposed to be. Besides that, the font is also overruled by Apple Mail's default font and all formatting is lost, which is frustrating.

I tried several image formats, but that didn't make any difference.

[adryan]

G'day, Þorvarður et al

The text formatting behavior you observe confirms my suspicion that NWP's merge operation uses Mail's Paste and Match Style command.

I have looked at this problem from many different angles and can find no simple solution. In the end, I think AppleScript is required.

I would use NWP to do the merging with the "Save many files" Output option. After all, this is the core task in merging documents and NWP provides the tools for this. I would then use AppleScript to create each Mail message. The script would use the list of recipient details to fill in the header fields appropriately. It would then copy the contents of the relevant NWP document produced by the merge operation and paste them into the Mail message. You only need a single AppleScript script to process the whole lot in one fell swoop.

Cheers,
Adrian

[phspaelti]

Hello Mitchell, Adrian, Þorvarður,
I tried this as well, and I get the same result (Sequoia 15.6.1). I don't see any [Obj].
To be clear this happens only with the "Compose Emails" which directly creates emails in the mail app.
If you merge to pdf or document the photo comes through fine. So I assume this is something about mail and/or its interaction with other apps.

As to the possiblity of writing a macro to fix this.
If you want this to send text mails with the photo included, I think you would have to use Apple Script. Actually you could perhaps just do this whole task using Automator using Apple contacts and skip Nisus altogether.
A Nisus macro could probably be written if your are happy attaching the messages as pdfs.
But I'm not gonna attempt any of these things right now.
If you do have an interest in any of these "solutions" and need help let me know.
Philip