Evoir, thanks for the assistance. I'm testing it out. By the way, I'm also managing a content management system and it's with DBMan SQL.

What you made me realise is that I had probably misunderstood some basic terms. Correct me/ confirm my new understanding:

What you term 'HTML' is ordinary text that is processed by our gossamer engined sw to produce good old HTML that shows up nice in our browsers. and what you call 'mark up' is text where WE give it HTML tags BEFORE it is given to the sw.

Am I correct? (I fear I got it the other way around!!)

I'll test and get back on to you, because there's another aspect to this problem, namely the importing of text data from our dtabase programs (mine's Filemaker Pro)... more later, thanks
Charly