Using Filemaker as a Text Editor

[evancooney]

I want to store text files as records in filemaker. Unfortunately, I have two problems 1) Text fields only hold 255 characters. 2) I can't markup the text (ie various text sizes, bold). Does anyone have any ideas around this? I don't want to do merge files. I want all the info to stay in one place, in Filemaker.

Regards,

Evan C

[danjacoby]

What version of Filemaker are you using?

Version 6 has a character limit of 64K, so it's a lot harder to run up against it. Additionally, you can markup the text all you want -- provided you're using a text field (with date, number and time fields you can't).

My advice -- upgrade.

[Vaughan]

Or embed HTML into the text fields, and use a browser as a viewer using the "Open URL" script step.

[RussBaker]

Text fields don't have a limit of 255 characters, its 64K as Dan says. BUT, in a calculation, you can only have 255 text characters between the quote marks. If you want to use longer text strings than this in a calc, you will need to break them up and concatenate them (&) or stick that text into some global storage fields and use the fields in your calcs. I think the latter option give you more design flexibility.

[evancooney]

The ultimate goal is take a series of text fields (company name, address, license info) and create a nice full-text license. Since the license will need to be tweaked on a per case basis, I need full text-editing capabilities once the initial draft has been generated. Exporting the company name, address and license info to MS Word is silly because then I have two seperate locations of data for each license. And I can't easily perform scripts on a group of word documents, among other problems

Also, How can I have multiple fonts within the same text field?

I am using FM6.

Regards,

Evan C

[danjacoby]

You have to do multiple fonts manually in each record. Go into the field, highlight the text you want to change, and change it manually.

Creating a "full-text license" is just a matter of creating a print layout where all the fields are where you need them in order to print correctly. One caveat: If you're using Windows, the only way to know exactly where the text will print is to print a sample.