But I've always had a lingering feeling that it could do a lot more..
-mouser
For what little it's worth, I suspect it's always going to be a bit niche. For me, I like the idea of a sort of halfway house between building documents with boilerplate sections chosen as required -- my first experiences of wordprocessors back in the <cough> early 1980s included interacting with the bits of them that allowed such things, even if I didn't use them very often -- and full-on mailmerge. But I'm not an ordinary user, and I quite often find myself diving headlong into things I don't know much about in order to solve a specific problem. TFLM was what seemed to be the best fit to a problem I was trying to solve at the time, and even with its limitations was very helpful. I haven't needed to do anything else like that since...
![Wink ;)](https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/Smileys/fun/wink.gif)
The Form Letter Machine is one of my apps that I regularly think about rewriting from scratch to be much more powerful and flexible. In fact I have rewritten it once as a fully working web app (tfdocs.com) that was pretty sophisticated, but that was abandoned due to lack of interest/funding/etc.
I did go look at the time, I think, but couldn't see a good reason for moving the sort of things I could envisage wanting to do off my local PC.
More flexible support for custom scripting and variables would be a key focus of any rewrite, and probably making it cross platform (mobile?), along with multiple output formats (pdf).
I think if you could do variables and (basic) formatting -- text enhancements, tabs -- and output in .doc format, or plaintext too, I guess, most people who'd have a need for something like TFLM would be able to take it on from there, wouldn't they? And the cross-platform thing -- you could be right but it doesn't strike me as an obvious need.
Anyway, the difficult dilemma for me is deciding whether its worth the effort to write a new version, and how much time I could spend on the project...
I guess if it's a "from the ground up" sort of a problem, it's probably never going to justify the extra work. It IS pretty good as it is, for the six people in the world who use it
![cheesy :D](https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/Smileys/fun/biggrin.gif)
Thanks for thinking about it, anyway!