printing addresses on label sheets

July 4, 200223 yr

Printing addresses on label-sheets.

Tonight was an exciting night. Not in the least because I met good friends, but I was able to demonstrate my Filemaker application on their computer. Windows, I have IMac.

Some 9 point fonts that are small on the Imac are really too small on the machine I met, so that has to be changed. On windows, when choosing a pop-up menu, the mousecursor is on another value in the pop up than the value actually in the field, so you always have to click outside the pop-up not to change values unwillingly. Mac does that better.

And of course there were some very good suggestions for improving things. Reflection..reflection, and there is also something as a developers-block. An end user sees things and thinks sometimes so simple and irrational, not bothered by second thoughts like, 'how to solve that with a portal'..and in the end their simple thoughts are not as bad as you think they are.

Back to the subject:

the printing of addresses on a label sheet on that windows machine in which I have defined fields like

<<name>>

<<address>>

<<zipcode_city>>

<<state>>

goes wrong with some labels, not all. 3 out of 24 are wrong: there sometimes is a blank line between the lines. There is no evident cause to find; the text-parts are not too long.

On the mac everything is okay. Does anybody recognize this? I have no explanation.

I also use another global g_complete_client_address, a text calculation of the different address-parts (name&"cr"&address&"cr" and so on) for mail-merge reasons, and using that concanated global instead of separate fields as shown above, might be the solution for that error that I don't understand.

Another question I have:

The from-left-to-right orientation of columns in label sheet printing you can influence with the settings of the left and right margins in the lay-out setup. You can also influence this orientation by answering the question that Filemaker puts up after a change of the margins (Do you want to recalculate the fields? Yes or No) with Yes, or No.

But there is another option you might consider and that is:

Menupoint Format>Text>Paragraph and then change the left indent of a selected group of fields (or that one concanated field). Did not try this until sofar; perhaps it is even impossible to perform an indent on a field.

My question finally is, how you guys solve the problem of getting the address neatly in the middle of a label in a 24x3 labelsheet, as I won't be the first one doing this.

Harryk