Tjebbe van Tijen

I just wondered whether any of you have any solution (or know about it) whereby PDF files in the 'web viewer' can be marked using the Acrobat reader Pro (I use version 9) . I use Mac platform., FMP Pro advance11 (switching to 13 soon). Marking PDFs is for the application I am developing essential. As hundreds of historical documents are catalogued and can be opened in the 'window viewer'. The user will than search through documents in the PDF (which has been passed through an OCR program). Now by copy & paste parts of the PDF document can be selected. It is essential that these selected parts are marked for later use, or use by others, who thus can know these parts have been processed already. I have tried several ways to get this working (also making Adobe professional 9 the Adobe reader preference of the Safari browser on my system (I think FMP uses that info to determine what PDF reader to use. I can not get it to work. I think that having this functionality would be a great enhancement for work with non-standr older historical documents ... So I would pleased with some insight/suggestions. Now I have to do the marking by having Adobe open external... (I can trigger - of course - Adobe Pro to open a specific file on a specific page (using Applescript) and when I later (re)load that file in the web viewer.. it shows up nicely... Thats is not really an integrated solution.

dear Moderator maybe LOL can be classified as lack of courtesy ... I am under the impression that I did understand the initial question. I would appreciate if you supply me with direct URL references to the things you mention in your reaction to my post.

Apart from the jokers here that missed your valuable point and make their lack of understanding public ....  When it comes to more complex databases & tables relationships, this question does arise. In my experience it is not one solution against another (specialised tables versus multi-puprose tables). One mostly needs a combination of both. Analysing the data you will need to process will show you at a certain point in the design process that several 'specialised tables' do have many fields/data types in common, hence they could well reside in one table with an extra field indicating the usage of the table. Example combining the data on persons and organisations in one table as the build up of personal names and organisation names do have many things in common. In the past I had specialised tables with many specialised fields. Now I tend to put all those details in a multipurpose table - with only a few fields - that links to the specialised table. The need for many fields often occurs because of multiple 'data versions' for one record element (field in a record). Example I do international bibliographical databases in many languages and also different scripts (Latin, Chinese trad. Chinese simpl., Japanese, etc.) That would end up with twenty or so fields for name variants. Of course one can make a more simple table that either links to itself for variations. That is a 'many to one relation' solution, and it brings down the number of fields in that table, one only has to make a level/indicator what particular 'name form' resides in one of several records all pointing to the same person. In my practice I do use often use also a 'join table' that allows me to make 'many to many relations'. Join-tables do allow for a design strategy with 'multi-purpose tables', as they combine two (or more) tables with their 'prime keys/unique record indicators'. I am working now on a system whereby I try to have all relations between the set of tables of database + rela external databases and their tables link through only ONE join-table (there can of course exist many specific occurrences of that join tables in the Filemaker relation system). My thought being that this way of working forces me to come up with solutions that are applicable to more than the usual 'specific relation'. It also will come handy when building some sort of search function through all the data elements of my system. The nice thing (you did notice that also I read here) that a 'join-table' allows you to further specify the meaning of that specific relationship. Whereas simple links between tow elements most often do not say anything about the specifics of that link, with a 'join-table' one can do that, with one or many more elements if wished. For myself I call that 'attributes' of a relation. Say in a bibliographical database it could say in a join table of a book with a person name, the relationship with a person's name has here the value of: - author - co-author - reviewer - subject (in the book) etcetera... Such attributes ir if you like call them 'ratings' do come of course from a controlled language value list (in my case I use a dictionary database with many specialised tables to keep control over a wide range of terms and codes. Last I post here a screen shot from my new person/organisation database in development..... I think I rename the specific fields also with 'data01', data02' etcetera and introduce an extra field 'data01field' that will with each record tell what is the meaning of that the 'data01', etc. fields. In this way I can use the same table for both persons and organisations. Â

Just implementing a documentation system for documentation on the internet; works fine using webviewer BUT... There is an oddity with pages that autostart and/or loop audio-visual content; once such a page has been started within my webviewer and I change the active URL of the webviewer, the audio/vis content keeps playing (without the page.... Example this URL http://iaaa.nl/hh/LBclips/win-hh.html When you open this URL in a standard web brwoser and click away from it, it stops (of course) palying; not so with FMP 10 webviewer. Only while this URL is active I can "kill" the looping audio/vis URL by using the webviewer command Go URL and make the URL an empty string Oddity is that when I activitate another URL from my databae and try to go back to the audio/vis URL it will not play anymore. When I move to another URL BEFORE having "killed" the audio/vis URL, I can NOT anymore stop the playing of that URL... so I need to close the window to get rid of it. To mee it "sounds" like a bug... the audio/vis stream is loaded into memory and my guess I need some command (say an Applescript) to "kill" that autoplay/loop thingy. I do not exclude I did oversee some workaround (FMP is in/famous for it) but I am afraid I stumbled upon a mistake of webviwer. Your suggestions are most welcome

Pardon me when I have overlooked some options, but I fail to limit my search results with the options available SEARCH engine of this very much appreciated forum. As there is such a lot of good questions and even better answers to find and as a forum users wants a specific result from a specific query, I wonder what is wrong with the indexes used by the forum search machine. My example to illustrate this situation is my search for a method to find some function, operator or workaround to add leading zeros to a text string (replicating a character or string by multiplying it with a variable number is sadly not included in FMP). Whether I enclose my search words as a phrase between "" or not does not seem to have an effect on the number of results I get. Also it is not clearly indicated if Boolean operators can be used or not. Advanced search gives a too big & ugly page with options for delimiters that do not always seem to operate .... Concluding: there is a lot to harvest on FM Forums but as a user I do not want to get the whole or a too big harvest in at each search... I want just that one straw or a handful!

I have not been aware of the retaining of the formatting of a field when using substitute... Somthing (as far as I can see) "not in the manual"; not even in the Filemaker pro 10 'the missing manual' book which I bought recently and which often does not supply what it suggests it will...

Very useful and with a neat example... (is it something from your shelves?) It comes close to what I need it for.... I am generating hundreds of small jpgs for roll-over menu in html; each rollover image has a background differing PNG transparencies and text calculated from a related database... I want to make this thumbnial generator into a flexible tool for several projects and different graphic needs; Your solution somehow relates to the first reaction to my post... Thanks a lot...

Thank you very much for your reaction... that is truly a workaround and your suggestions are helpful to me a a researcher usinf Filemaker for many years, but not being a programmer myself. Your suggestion looks like a true workaround, ehich can be a sport with FMP...

For a module that generates text overlays over two superimposed picture container fields (one = background; the other a half transparent PNG image) I want to be able to change by script the alignment settings of my Text overlay field on a specific layout (using for instance its object name). I may have overlooked a function or workaround, but till now it seems to me that this not possible. Suggestions (also for plug-ins allowing this) are welcome...

This is the hard.software context: crash report FMP 10 on OSX10.4.11 Mac G5 2.66 Dual Core Intel Xeon java version "1.5.0_19" Java 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_19-b02-306) Java HotSpot Client VM (build 1.5.0_19-138, mixed mode, sharing) I load several of the Scriptmaker functions as a startup script. I do get two times a warning panel with he following text: "java.lang.illegalArgumentException: Invalid parameter name ":parameter names can only contain alphanumeric characters and underscores" all the startup Scriptmakers functionsI use have been put in a set of varibales in my startup script; each of these codes I took literally with cut & paste from the ScriptMaker database... The error message does NOT indicate which of the functions contains a wrong parameter The functions I load are: ScreenCapture GetURLaContainerPart2 GetURLasContainer AppendToFile ColorChooserDialogue ReadFileContents WriteToFile GetURLasText GetFileAsContainer CropImage RemoveHTMLtags QuicktimeFrameCapture PopupMenu

Just testing several of the useful scripts of 360... and once again I bump into this bad habit of using these incorrect terms: (left, top, right, bottom) x and y position left top = correct but right bottom should better say, or at least ad a note: the size of the rectangle to be captured starting from the left/top position See this bad habit already for 25 years!!! A simple way to grab a screen shot of a specified rectangle of your screen. Pass in the coordinates (left, top, right, bottom) of the area that you want to take a picture of. You can use the FileMaker Get(ScreenWidth) and Get(ScreenHeight) to get the entire screen area.

I came to this question because of a similar question and the answers were almost right for me, so I like to add this tiny thing to it: Fenton wrote: A FileMaker syntax path can be seen in the Help, and also at the bottom of all of those dialogs. In this case you'd use an full path, which might look like: $filemac:/Macintosh HD/Users/fej/Desktop/some file.mp3 This was almost clear to me, but I had to do some try & error before I figured out what Fenton actually meant. It is about the $ that indicates a local variable and which should not be made part of the file path string. $filemac:/Macintosh HD/Users/fej/Desktop/some file.mp3 May suggest that the $ sign is a part of the file path string, but it is NOT. This can be obvious for people working daily in FMP programming, but I am a user who comes back to this program only from time to time and always had had [problems with refined understanding of syntax... I need just a simple clear example. So let me give one such an example here, so other "dumbos" like me may profit: I use the script step: Set Variable and give the following calculation $EmailAttachmentPath = Substitute(AMSnote::gAttachmentFolderFilePathX; "/Volumes"; "filemac:") In my global field gAttachmentFolderFilePathX I have stored a calculated file path and name that includes a folder on a certain hard disk volume (I use InsideScan plugin for storing this and that plugin gives by default the file path in the format /Volumes/... etcetera) As I am not yet sure whether or not FMP 10 want the file path formulated as filemac: or with the /Volumes format I just reformatted the folder path name to be the same as in the example by Fenton. Almost there ... So then in the email script step I simply enter as the attachment the string $EmailAttachmentPath ... and that works perfect. I have chosen thjs way of working as I am first exporting the image I am attaching to an email to a directory that is stored in global field and want the names of the attached image files to correspond with the unique indicators of the fields in my database (I use sets of repeating fields to store my data). Last I keep wondering why in newer versions of Filemaker the option of a variable file attachment is not included. Now we have something that is in fact such a function, but seems to be more of a workaround (so freuqnetly needed in Filemaker... which I use for over a decade now).

I just lost several hours of work because on my local network the hosting FMP tables were closed before the remote had logged out (though several hours had passed before this happened). Nom I want to prevent this happening again and I want to know how/when data is written from the remote to the host. My guess is that the command "flush cache to disk" might do this. If not what can be done? Once more data loss occired because the host had closed down before the remote had logged out.

In some ways Filemaker Pro has very old fashioned limitations, like the missing option to display a found set of records in multiple rows & columns in Browsing mode. This option is limited to the View/Printing mode, and .. in that last mode no interaction whatsoever is possible with what one sees nicely on the screen. Of course there are work-arounds and I have build one: - exporting thumbnail pictures to rows of repeating fields That works fine, but of course it needs a little time (each time) to construct such a lightbox of pictures. I tried to scan this forum for solutions, but alas the search engine of FM Forums is pretty limited and comes up with a result lists that contain words from my search terms, but with NO relevance to my question (words between "" are not recognized as separate strings by the search engine). So I try this section of the forum: anybody has a trick or workaround or knows a plugin that will show a found set of (image text fields) in multiple rows & columns (light a photo lightbox)?