Hello. I am new and let me tell you first... Thanks for a great resource and a plan to get help with Filemaker. I have used FMP for a very long time so maybe I can offer some help too.

Here is my current problem:

We have upgraded many of our Macs to OS X 10.2.4 and are seeing several problems. All of my layouts that should print landscape are now printing portrait. It seems that we now have two orientations of landscape from "Page Setup" now and Filemaker is defaulting to portrait even though I set my scripts up to print landscape.

Another problem ( I believe associated with the MacOS X upgrade) is with some graphics stored in a global container field. The graphics will not display.

Any hints, help, kind words of encouragement! Thank you very much.

The "Restore" option for "Page Setup" is stored separately for each operating system, which means for every operating system that you want it to work on, you have to manually recreate the desired page setup and print dialog settings, then open the script and close it to add them to the script step.

My testing indicates that the page setup options are driver-specific. I select my inkjet printer, set the page to landscape and save this is a script. If I change the page to portrait then run the script it will retuen to landscape.

However if I now change printers (say to my laser printer) and run the script it does nothing useful. It appears I have to save for each OS and each printer driver. Which poses a huge problem for solution delivery.

In OS X, you can make your page setup selections for "Any Printer"... so I assume FM will restore the settings that way, but that doesn't help for settings in the print dialog (such as number of copies).

It's mostly only page orientation and size I care about.

The MacOS X enhancement would be nice for all OSs, but perhaps it's a limitation of the OSs themselves that cause the problem i the first place?

I think what it comes down to is that the "restore" option does not store specific settings (eg: page orientation=landscape), rather it just remembers the current state (eg: this field in this dialog is set to this value), it doesn't care what the fields actually do. Otherwise, I can't see how the restore option would remember whether or not to open a cash drawer or cut the paper (which it does).

The advantage of course is that it remembers driver-specific features (like cash drawer settings). The disadvantage is that what it "remembers" for one driver might not be stored exactly the same way for another driver, and therefore won't work.

What I need is for the users to be able to set these options without having to use scriptmaker.

We need an "Update Page Setup Saved Information []" script step. That way users can set up their page, click a button and it's stored in the script.

This is a disaster problem for me and is keeping me in OS 9.2 for my entire business. How does one get a problem like this (I like the idea of the "remember specific printer settings" option) solved?

You have three options:

1. Go to Page Setup. Create the setup you want. Reopen the script and close it, resetting the Page Setup.

2. Have the script include a Page Setup command, so that individual users can do the Page Setup manually every time they run the script.

3. Cry. A lot.

fvprice,

I'm not sure what problems there are remaining beyond what has been discussed... simply do a manual page setup then open/close the script, repeat on each operating system you plan to use it on.

Am I missing something?

Maybe there are still problems if you are distributing as a box set (because you don't know what printers your customers are using)... I'm not sure if this would be a problem in OS X.