Why does InDesign 5.5 not recognizing tags from text output from Filemaker 11?

Question

We just upgraded all of our computer and servers at the office. We were using OS 9 operating system with QuarkXpress and Filemaker 5. In the process of deciding on the route to go with upgrades we decided to go ahead and switch to InDesign instead of continueing with Quark.
The problem is that we run a database inside of Filemaker Pro and we output text into our Quark files well now with InDesign I can not for the life of me figure out why our tags are not being recognized by InDesign. I have reviewed every option when placing the text file and have not seen anything that will fix it. In Quark when you import text you have the option to click a box and it will let you import with style sheets. I have set up the same paragraph styles in InDesign and it still doesn't work.
Does anybody have any clue what might be happening? Any help would be appreciated, I need something to just get started on trying to fix this issue. It is a major issue due to the fact that I work for a classifieds newspaper and I need this text weekly. I have spent way too much time on this already and I am still in the same boat as I was when I started.
Thank you in advance for your help!

Answer 1

One assumes there is some existing software generating this stuff.
John is absolutely correct when he says that it would be a simple set of find/replace operations; if you are savvy enough to be able to get a total count of the number of tags used in your output, and if you can automate a single find/replace operation, then you can figure out how much it costs you to roll your own Quark-tags-to-Indy-tags solution and compare it against the cost of the software.
I was really referring more to the abstract. In the concrete, I guess I assumed we would find whatever was generating the XPress tags and change it to generate InDesign Tagged Text. It's just a matter of finding a few static strings and changing them... it's not like there are any changes to *logic*...
Personally, I'm a strong believer in Fixing It Right. yeah, $400 is cheap, but it's a lame patch to the problem. You shouldn't be using XPress Tags in InDesign, might as well move your automation over to doing it the InDesign way. (Unless, of course, there's an advantage to XPress Tags. And there are a few, as David's article points ut.)
However, I can't tell if he's being genuine or not; if you didn't notice that Quark tags and Indy tagged text are not the same format, then you probably don't have the in-house scripting capability to write your own converter. If you have that expertise in-house, then go for it. For my own part, I am such a slow scripter that paying someone else a few hundred bucks will invariably be cheaper than writing my own. Of course, if I didn't have any money to spend then I'm sure that I'd become a faster scripter quire rapidly.
I was serious, but I wasn't advocating a converter. That adds an extra step to the workflow, and it's also ugly. Just fix whatever makes the XPressTags to do IDTT instead.
There's something funny about the guy from the non-profit telling other people to spend money, I can't quite put my finger on it though :-).