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Text formatting and printing bugs!

carabas

By carabas
in FileMaker Pro v7 – v9

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carabas Rookie

carabas

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I've been intensively using FMPro6 as a text processor for letters and press releases, and as a web archive. Many new features are interesting, but:

1. I am astonished to see that v. 7 (Trial) turns any text pasted from the clipboard (or dragged and dropped) to plain text! (v. 6 would deal with rich text). And once you've restored your text formatting, there is no way to move it out, since the Export Field Contents command, as well as the copy-paste or drag-and-drop methods, only generates plain text.

2. On the other hand, justified paragraphs are clipped, with unequal line length! Some last words in a line are shortened by 2-3 characters...

3. Italic fonts are double-obliqued (i.e. the "italic" font is applied, and then obliqued as if there were only a "plain" font in the suitcase).

4. FM still cuts a line of text in two parts when it prints a field that can't fit on a single page.

Did I miss something, is the "turn-everything-to-plain-text" a new feature, or are there serious bugs in this magnificent release? I shall not upgrade until I'im fixed...

Version: v6.x

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

iMarcW Collaborator

iMarcW

Posted
Posted

It's a feature to me. This is definitely something you either love or hate, so it would be wise to have a preference or field format option for controlling this. Personally, I can't stand that (pre-7) when you paste something from an e-mail into FileMaker, it keeps the formatting of your e-mail text (regardless of whether the e-mail is plain text or HTML) and overrides your existing field format in *all* layouts, so you're printing namebadges and everything is supposed to be 36 pt. Frutiger Extra Bold except for this one record where it shows up in 12 pt. Courier. The only way to fix it by hand is to empty the field, click out and retype (or copy, paste into a text editor like BBEdit and copy/paste back). I know there are Set Field script kludges to take care of it too, but it's a real PITA for us.

carabas Rookie

carabas

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Well: let's say it is better to have all our imported text flattened to a standard font and size. But once you've enriched it, how will you export it? For me, a simple drag-and drop into an rtf-aware app was enough to generate true articles, with italics, bolds, uppercases, etc.

And then there's that obvious bug with justified text, clipped and irregular like a saw. Perhaps Windows users don't have it?

ESpringer Rising Star

ESpringer

Posted
Posted

This is a *major* issue for me too, since I use FileMaker to process academic exchanges, including pasting in student papers, excerpts from scholarly texts, etc. Not being able to get stuff in and out with styles intact makes FileMaker unmanageable as a storehouse for text that needs to be quoted correctly, which means preserving italics.

It's true that there used to be an occasional nuissance with styles smuggled in by accident during a paste, but the habit of "Paste text only" (option key together with paste command), together with a "Clean field of style in all found records" script easily solved it. To compensate for the default "no-style" now, there ought to be an option to Paste *with* style, and to Copy *with* style.

rivet Mentor

rivet

Posted
Posted

I wonder if it is just a bug because if you hold the option key you still get the 'Paste Text Only' in the menu so hopfully 7.02 will fix that.

CobaltSky Veteran

CobaltSky

Posted
Posted

Note that the 'paste with style' and 'paste text only' still works as it did before, but only for text being copied and pasted from elsewhere within FileMaker 7. It seems that clipboard formatting is being ignored if it comes from outside FileMaker. Hard to say if this was intended by FMI but regardless of that it will be problematic in some situations.

On the subject of *exporting* with style, however, you might like to check out the new GetAsCSS( ) and GetAsSVG( ) functions which will automatically apply format tags which correspond to FileMaker's internal character level formatting.

For example, if you create a calc with the formula:

"<html>

  • Newbies
selowitch Newbie

selowitch

Posted
  • Newbies
Posted

Does anybody know how to get my mixed-italics-bold-and-roman text safely out of a Filemaker 6 field and into a web page (with appropriate <em>/<i> and/or <strong>/<b> tags) via Lasso/LDML?

carabas Rookie

carabas

Posted
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OK, FM7 ignores formatting from any external source. On the other hand, it preserves text formatting from FM6 files when converted. See what I'im doing now? Dropping text into a FM6 scrapbook and converting sets of new records...

As for the other bugs, another thread mentions that FM7 uses only TrueType fonts. This explains perhaps its strange behaviour with OpenType italics that I've noticed.

I'im still interested in knowing whether anyone can print a correctly justified field, with no clipping, from FM7?

Version: v6.x

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

Texarado Apprentice

Texarado

Posted
Posted

Not only has font appearance changed (in some cases for the much worse), text fields in some (not all) files converted from FMP-6 behave strangely. (Words are split at the end of a text line instead of going to the next line intact.) See the sample file that is attached to this post.

These problems, coupled with much slower searches within a DB, made us revert to FMP-6.

"Upgrading" to FMP-7 was a huge mistake. I'm sorry we wasted the money .

Version: v7.x

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

Sample_File_6_to_7.pdf

DykstrL Proficient

DykstrL

Posted
Posted

To fix the word-wrapping problem, go into the File Options, and on the "Text" tab, make sure that "Use Roman language line-breaking" is checked. That should fix it.

Texarado Apprentice

Texarado

Posted
Posted

Thank you! It worked!

Is that a new feature? ("File Options" > Text > "Use Roman language line-breaking"). And must I activate it for each file I create? Doesn't look like an application-level preference.

Thanks!!!!

Version: v7.x

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

carabas Rookie

carabas

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Indeed, the GetAsCSS function is a formidable exporting tool. I do not understand its sibling, though: GetAsSVG.

Yet I found a new bug playing with that: if I put the "Export field contents" step into an exporting script, my script hangs like an infinite loop!

I have to stop it manually (Cmd-.) if I want to see the result.

Anyone else noticed this?

Version: v6.x

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

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rgasser Newbie

rgasser

Posted
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Posted

"FROM: carabas 1. I am astonished to see that v. 7 (Trial) turns any text pasted from the clipboard (or dragged and dropped) to plain text! (v. 6 would deal with rich text). And once you've restored your text formatting, there is no way to move it out, since the Export Field Contents command, as well as the copy-paste or drag-and-drop methods, only generates plain text."

RESPONSE:

Also, the "Send Mail" button/script/command causes text style/font.size/color to be lost and plain text to be used for the email.

I called Filemaker Tech Support today Mar 24, 2004 and they have verified this problem and currently escalated this issue to be looked into by the software engineering team. They claim it is only evident in OSX 10.3.3 and not in OSX 10.3

In addition I requested they look into the ~12 page printout per record limit esp. in light that FileMaker 7.0 lets you have up to 2GB of data in a single text field in a single record. (2GB is a hell of a lot more pages than 12 and it would be nice to be able to print that data without having to break it up into pieces)

If you too would like this 12 page limit removed, I would appreciate you saying so with Filemaker feedback at http://www.filemaker.com/company/product_feature_request.html

I will keep the forum informed as to what I find out about the copy/paste bug and the 12 page print limit.

thanks

Ray

Version: Developer v7

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

carabas Rookie

carabas

Posted
  • Author
Posted

rgasser wrote : "In addition I requested they look into the ~12 page printout per record limit esp. in light that FileMaker 7.0 lets you have up to 2GB of data in a single text field in a single record."

There is another lack related to long document printing : FM still cannot break a text flow cleanly between two pages, i.e. in most cases the last line on a page appears clipped on the bottom, and the rest of the clipping is shifted to the next page!

This behaviour is inherited and very ugly for printing purposes.

  • 3 weeks later...
Mikey Newbie

Mikey

Posted
Posted

carabas said:

rgasser wrote : "..... FM still cannot break a text flow cleanly between two pages, i.e. in most cases the last line on a page appears clipped on the bottom, and the rest of the clipping is shifted to the next page!

This behaviour is inherited and very ugly for printing purposes.

And still LONG overdue for a fix by FMI. This goes back all the way to FMP2 (where I started).

FileMaker Version: 7

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

  • 4 months later...

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