Hi All,

I wish to be able to preview a letter before printing. I have set up the to, from, date ok but the body text only shows to the field limit. If the body text is greater than the length of the field it cuts off the rest of the text. I have also tried the body text as a merge field with the same result. After the body text I also want to be able to show from and a couple more fields which should shift upwards depending upon the length of the body text. If the text is more than 1 page this needs to be catered for.

Is someone able to show how to achieve.

Many thanks,

Paul

You need to familiarise yoursdelf with FMP's "Sliding/Printing" feature. The basic operation is this:

FileMaker can shrink fields, but not expand them. On your layout you need to make the fields large enough to fit the *most* amount of text it will have. Then format the fields with the Sliding/Printing feature (and shrink the enclosing part too).

Note: Sliding/Printing only works in Preview mode or when printed. It does not work in Browse mode. For this reason you'll probably need seperate data entry and print layouts.

You're on the right track with using Merge fields. You can put all of the merge fields in one text block and then stretch the text block to be a little bigger than the maximum amount of text that would be entered. When printed, it will automatically shrink down to the size needed.

Vaughan is right though - you will need a separate layout for printing.