>Yeah, I'm trying to get out of the general field and I'd like to be able to pull strictly from the memo field and display in an edit box on the screen.
That would actually have to be a browser box, with possibly some javascript tool inside if you want to make it both editable and richtext capable - like most of the forums have.
> How would I do the html conversion?
There are tools you can employ, most of them not free, but you may already have an automatable text processor which could do it. Even Word can, IIRC (save as html), but you'd better extract only the body of the text from it and replace all the mso* tags with normal tags - Word creates a very heavy stylesheet and inserts it into pretty much anything. LibreOffice may be easier on the styles and may produce a lighter html, but I haven't even tried to automate it yet.
Maybe staying with rtf but storing it as just rtf text in a simple memo field is the easiest way. You could just open it up as the general field, save as rtf, replace the simple memo with filetostr({saved file name here.rtf})