Printing lunacy...

[Mark Allen]

I'm hoping someone out there can help me with this because FileMaker technical support clearly can't! I'm having some printing problems on the two machines in my office that have recently been upgraded to Mac OS X.3.1 and it's all a bit strange.

The majority of our computers in the office run on OS 9 and it's generally been pretty uneventful on the dodgy-printing front for the last four years. I've personally been running various versions of OS X on my computer, again, without any problems, but the second I upgraded my computer to OS X.3, I started to have grief with print outs that we've never had before and the same thing happened when I upgraded another machine in the office to OS X.3.

What happens is that although there are only three pages in the record I'm trying to print, it's printing out four pages, because for some reason the bottom bit of every page is carried over to the top of the next page, causing them all to be out of alignment.

The weird thing is that when I print the same record from a machine running OS 9 or an earlier version of OS X, it's fine - I only get grief when printing from OS X.3.

At first it seemed like it was a letter size problem with OS X.3 (I'm in the UK, so I thought it was just defaulting to US Letter size rather than A4), but I set A4 as the default and it's still playing up. When I look at the document in preview mode, it looks exactly as it does when it's printed - with bits of text pushed onto the next page - so I don't think it's a problem with the printer drivers.

I had a slight inkling that it could be something to do with print margins in the OS X.3 version of FileMaker, but you can't set print margins for an entire application - only individual databases and layouts, and if I did that, surely it would put the pages out of alignment when people print in OS 9?

When I called FileMaker, they told me to reinstall FileMaker 5.5, which I did (no joy), then they told me to update to FileMaker version 2, which I did (still no joy), then they told me to try and create a new database and see if the problem was the same, which I did (and yes, still no joy). It's at this point that I realised that FileMaker were even more clueless than me and that whoever I was speaking to was probably just trying to keep me busy until they finished their shift, so one of their colleagues would have to deal with me next time I called.

When I saw this forum, I thought I'd probably be able to get more sense out of the people that use FileMaker every day and may have encountered this problem before.

So... anybody got any bright ideas? I'd really appreciate your help.

Cheers

[color:"blue"]