Printing onto an Original Form

[BrentHedden]

The company I'm with reproduces medical credentialing forms for many companies. We use FM6 and PCs. 98% of the forms we have uses an on-screen layout and fields that print out just fine. The other 2% of the forms are copywrite-restricted, so we can't reproduce the pages on-screen. We have to have the fields placed exactly right on the layout, then load an original application into the printer, and print the fields onto the paper. So, it looks like the application was filled out with a typewriter. This works fine.

Now the problem - Different printers will have different results on how the printout looks vertically, and some fields won't be in the right place. Horizontally, it looks great. I've tried a few different methods with no good results.

I would like to be able to adjust the printout to print higher if numberic field 'X' is a negative number, and even higher if 'X' is a lower negative number, And to print lower if 'X' is a positive number, and even lower if "X" is a greater positive number. Or in other works, I want to 'slide' all the fields up or down as many times as needed. If possible, I would like to be able to do the same thing horizontally as well, although it's not nesessary.

Any ideas?

[BobWeaver]

Yes. I have done this before. It is a nightmare to set up if you have a lot of fields. However, I've just had an idea for a simpler method than what I previously used. I will give it a try, and if it works, I will post a sample. Otherwise, I will explain the other dreaded method.

[BobWeaver]

Okay, I got it to work. Have a look at this topic in the samples section.

[BrentHedden]

Thanks! It's working, but some parts it is not!

I was able to see what you had, and was able to copy into the form I'm working on. Here is the wierd part that I'm not sure of -

Will the margins affect how much the fields will slide? I've got a few fields that are very close to the left and right margins, and these ones wont go anywhere. There is a field above the beforementioned ones, which is in the center of the layout, and it's sliding around no problem. I'm not fully aware of how sliding works, since I've never used it much before.

Any ideas?

[BobWeaver]

Don't position any of the fields so that they are over top of, or overlapping the spacer containers. Likewise with the surrounding boxes. All fields and surrounding boxes must be completely below and to the right of the spacer containers. And that's okay, because the spacer containers will shrink down to 3 pixels at the minimum shift setting, and the fields will move to the edge of the page along with them.

The only problem that I have encountered doing this is with some poorly designed forms that have some fields located right at the outside edge of the printer's printable area.

Also, don't forget to set the layout to "fixed margins", and set all four margins to zero.

[BrentHedden]

Excellent! works as outlined! And the nice thing is, you can have it slide more than what is set up in your example, but I highly doubt it will ever be necessary. I found that moving all the fields around when the gHorizontalShift and gVerticalShift are set to 10 (which is the 'center'), will give you the bext results.

Now for all of you reading this, here is another thing that I'm wondering if it'll work. Is there a way in browse mode to move the individual fields around? Since 95% of our clients use the runtime version of Filemaker, getting into layout mode is impossible.

[BobWeaver]

I suppose that you could create merge fields of the form:

<<SpacerField>><<DataField>>

Then format the SpacerField text to be a monospaced font (like Courier) at a size of 1 or 2 points. The DataField part would be whatever you want, such as Arial 12 point. Then, to move the field to the right, add spaces to SpacerField. To move down, add carriage returns to SpacerField. You would have to set the line spacing format to a very small value in order to get a small vertical increment. You would have to create a different SpacerField for each field that you want to move independently. SpacerField could be a calculation of the form:

Left("