We recently moved from Macs to XP and have started to experience a strange happening when printing layouts with text fields, i.e., just about all of them!

I've simplified the problem with a text field with a border on a layout. I've typed some text into the field so that on the screen and in Preview the text occupies the space I've allocated to the field. But when it's printed there is a gap between the end of the text and the bottom of the text field.

Can anyone explain why, or better still, what to do to get rid of the gap? I've tried Sliding, using different fonts, using different printers. It even happens when I create a new database. Surely not everyone using Filemaker 6.0v4 on XP is experiencing this, so it must be something to do with our setup.

I have 40 people using a suite of files and all letters they're sending out look awful, because of gaps appearing on printouts that just aren't there in Preview. Pretty desperate. Any ideas?

This topic comes up from time to time.

The problem is in the specification of the fonts and how the two platforms desplay and print them.

Do a search for the names of the two fonts most often recommend for cross platform development, Verdana and Arial, and you should pull several threads to read. I did a search for Verdana and pulled up two that were informational, here is one of them.

click here

HTH

Lee

I had a similar problem recently. The default for the printer driver was to substitute its own fonts for the job and not use the system fonts.

Thanks for the replies.

Lee - I've had a read of a thread and will attempt to get some more up to date fonts to see if that makes any difference. We recently changed our 'house font' from Palatino on the Macs to Arial on the PCs. It could be that as we go in and modify the layouts to use Arial that a problem with that layout occurs.

Vaughan - Thanks, I'll pursue this as well. Could you tell me how to force the use of system fonts? Though just another thought, to speed things up when testing I've been printing to a PDF file - which still shows the gap. As this doesn't go to the printer perhaps it isn't a printer fonts issue. I don't know anything about this.

Any further thoughts or avenues to investigate would be hugely appreciated.

Mark

Lee, Thanks for the idea of pursuing fonts. I'm going through all fonts on our system to see if any of them don't leave the 'gaps'.

Vaughan, I had a look at printer fonts, but couldn't get it to lose the 'gap'.

In the end I succumbed to exporting data and putting it into mail merge documents. It's the first time in 12 years as a filemaker user I've had to generate letters to contacts outside of the database. It's a sad week - though has to be said, mail merge does a good job.

I see FMP 7 has fixed the problem.

Mark