printing/sliding/margins

[harryk]

I have some questions about printing, sliding, margins as I am deep in those subjects at the moment.

1) I fully understand the sliding options but in some circumstances a line below a page with a lot of slided fields is 'cut in half'. I did NOT select the 'Allow part to break across page boundaries option'. Are there any tips/tricks to avoid this 'cut in half' of a line, or is this something we have to live with.

(By the way, the mac OS is 9.02 not X, so X-printing issues excluded)

2) When anticipating possible long texts in a textfield, up till now I presume you have to anticipate the maximum length by stretching that field over a lot of pages, as the field length is always the maximum limit printed. (Of course wih sliding you avoid the empty pages being printed). Am I right with this presumption? Can't find any option to extend a field automatically when printing, when the contents exceed the defined length. (wonder now, if a merged field breaks its boundaries..)

3) I am writing a runtime solution from which a lot of printing will take place, also window systems. At this moment I orientate on the mac with the Epson SC 740 selected. This printer can print left and right margins which are small, or zero. Have any of you encountered situations in which the margins you dealed with, and within you defined your print lay-outs, failed on other printers having smaller margins (esp. left-right?)

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Harryk

[danjacoby]

My only general comment is that I always set fixed margins on any layouts that might be printed, and if the user needs to have a page setup or printer setup that allows the full page to be printed I make sure that the user knows this. By setting fixed margins, you don't have a problem with different printers having different "default" margins.

[BobWeaver]

Item 1 is a tricky problem that has plagued Filemaker since before it evolved legs and started crawling on land. About a year ago I spent an afternoon experimenting with the sliced line problem and came up with a reasonable solution. I posted my findings here:

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB8&Number=1518&page=1&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=all&fpart=1

Item 2: You are correct. You have to size the various fields big enough to hold anything that it may ever contain and then allow it to shrink as necessary.

Item 3: Take Dan's advice and use fixed margins that are big enough (1/2" is probably good) that the layout will work on any printer.

[harryk]

Thanks for your 'rainy sunday afternoon' explanation on the 'cutting lines' problem elsewhere in this board, I understand what you mean. As I have not one textfield but 24 fields (twice month comments) that slide and have to tie up exactly, it will be quite a job..

Harryk

[BobWeaver]

You could possibly make a calculation field to concatenate all 24 fields together and then print that field.

[harryk]

One of the major drawbacks is indeed that the customer does not change the font nor the size or style of the field. You pointed that out already in your explanation. Translating to calculation fields is the solution for that, but I make some attachment in the manual, that if the customer wants, he can screw up a set-out lay-out completely if he wants that..I am not going to make extra calc fields for that purpose, I have an awful lot of fields already..Sensible users won't change font/size/style of input fields..

It is, by the way, very probably so that also the sliding of fields can be calculated beforehand, as this will happen always line-based. But the sliding fields must indeed then be put tight together, no in between space, and, as I write this I think of a problem, the lenght of the sliding field itself must be an exact multiplication of a line.. I think.

Although some testing did work for me after neatly adjusting the header size, I would not dare to bet it is 100% reliable. But then, some imperfections may still occur in a work of art..

Harryk

[BobWeaver]

If all the fields are the same font/size and they are all set to shrink/slide, then even if there is space between them on the layout, they should all scrunch together when you print.

Regarding the adjustment of the header, the error will accumulate with each page for the current record and then resets for the next record. So, if you create a test record with the maximum amount of text and the last page breaks okay, then you should be all right for any situation.