I have 4 layouts in a database, each is one page of a form. I have combined them all into a 5th layout to make printing easier. The problem is different users print to different printers each with different margins set up. This causes the text to flow differently based on the available print area....

Given that I have a Body part which is 4 pages long, and I have each page laid out small enough to print to the printer with the least available print area, is there any way to insert page breaks (3 total) into the Body part so that regardless of which printer is being used, I don't get text reflow?

Thanks!

I have a similar situation with one of my clients - the sales reps use a mix of Macs and PCs, but need to produce the same order sheets on different systems/printers. This is only a two-page situation, but what I did to create page breaks was to simply switch layouts - that is, I've got different layouts containing different sets of data, and I've scripted the printing process to go to one layout, print the record, then go to the second layout and print again. What I get is two correctly formatted pages, no matter how short each entry is.

In your case, instead of combining the 4 layouts into one, make each one its own printable page, then print each in turn. If you're using Print Without Dialog, it makes no difference to the user, and print times are only slightly increased. You can also clearly mark each one with a page number, etc.

-Stanley

Go to the Layout setup, and select fixed margins. Then set them to something that will fit the printer with the smallest print area.

On your layout, check where the page breaks are (use the view page breaks option), and reposition the fields to avoid the breaks.

Stanley - that's exactly how I currently print, each page of the form is a separate layout, the print script flips through the appropriate pages and sends them as individual print jobs. That works fine.

The current issue arose out of the new need to print these 1-4 page forms to PDF. The current method actually sends 4 print jobs (which is transparent to the user, their 1-4 pages appear at the printer just fine), but sending 1-4 prints jobs to Acrobat doesn't easilly generate a single PDF, hence the need to build layouts with all the pages in one.

Bob - I feel like an idiot, don't know how I overlooked the fixed margins every time, that should work fine, thanks!