Dear collective FMwisdom,

From The Netherlands I wish everyone a happy new year.

Can anyone help me with the following problems. All three appear when I want to print bibliographical records with filemaker.

- Sliding objects when using merge fields. The problem is that when different merge-fields are defined in a layout below each other, they do not shrink totally when empty. For example if the first 2 merge fields in a layout are empty and the 3rd is not empty the 2 empty merge-fields leave a 2 line space. Does anyone has a solution for this problem?

- The reason why I used merge-fields is that Filemaker apparently cannot contain different character types in one field, and it can within merge fields. Does anyone has experience with that?

- In a print-layout I want different records to be printed and have the range of the item numbers (where item number is a field defined in the database) which are presented on each page printed at the upper right corner. So if records nos. 231 till 260 appear on the page I want this range to be printed

'231-260' at the upper right corner of the page. Is there a solution to do so?

- In the same way I would like to have a dictionary style running head printed at the left upper corner of each page. For example when the bibliographical records of works from bach to beethoven are presented on one page I would like to have these running heads printed at the upper left corner of the page: 'bach-beethoven'. Anyone?

All suggestions welcome.

I think that merge fields take up a minimum of 1 line and cannot be shrunk any smaller. Actual fields do not have this limitation.

Do you know EXACTLY how many records appear on each page or is it variable? If it is a known number, then you could define a calculation based upon the current page number to show the range of records.

You can fix your first 2 problems by replacing the merge fields with unstored calculations that have as their output type= 'text'. Just convert all of the input types to be text.