In my initial brief look at FM7, the one glaring thing I have noticed is that text on layouts is horrible. Text is fuzzy and appears out of focus. Trying various options to make it more acceptable, I can find no suitable option that gets the fonts to look like they did in FM6.

Am I missing something, or is this design intent. If this is design intent then in my opinion this will probably make FM7 layouts useless for a significant number of people. I have several users with less than perfect eyesight and it will be hard for them to read the new text.

Echo

Check out some of the recent psotings here, this has been a topic a few times. unfortunately it hasn't been resolved as far as I can recall.

It'd be nice to know what OS you're using...

It's probably anti-aliasing. On MacOS X FMP 7 does look different. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. MacOS X has an option to control font smoothing, does Windows have something similar?

I think with the trend for higher-resolution monitors with higher pixel densities anti-aliasing is going to be a necessity.

My fonts in FMPro 7 using Mac Panther look terrible on screen. And in layout mode, I am having difficulty positioning my cursor in text I created in FMPro 6. If you're designing layouts needing any level of precise text placement/arrangement, stay with FMPro 6.

Windoze XP has a setting: Display Properties/Appearance/Effects "Use the following Method to Smooth Screen Fonts: Regular or Clear Type

I tried Regular, Clear Type and deselecting the option all together - no changed in the font appearance on FM7. I've tried this on on a laptop as well as a high quality desktop, same deal. I can live with it for the other bonus' I get with FM7, but it is annoying.

FM7 has its own built-in anti-aliasing engine, it does not use the OS' anti-aliasing.

FM7's engine works on fonts and vector graphics.

Let's hope this is fixed asap. If nothing else, perhaps a pref to turn it off and use the OS' anti-aliasing.

The lack of support for PostScript fonts means I will not be able to upgrade many of my clients who are design firms as their forms use PostScript fonts that are not available as TrueType.

Daniel

I am using Windows XP.

Not only is the text fuzzy and unfocused, a 12pt Arial font in FM7 is physically smaller than the same font in FM6.

I find it incredible that Filemaker did not get this type of feedback from the developer community during FM7's development.

Echo

FM is the only database that can be used as a quick visual publishing solution. With bugs like: fuzzy smoothing, no PostScript, bad OpenType (as I noticed), no justified paragraphs, this huge Filemaker feature is brought down to zero! We are not willing to convert our reports to XPress or InDesign (via plain text exporting) when we are just a couple of stupid bugs away from usable printouts...

Version: v6.x

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

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 .

Sample_File_6_to_7.pdf

The wrap-around error described above sounds like the "Use Roman language line-breaking" option has been unchecked (perhaps something that the conversion process does by mistake).

Check the box next to File->File Options...->Text->Use Roman language line-breaking

HTH,

Jeff

Try cleaning up your file references and reindexing the fields you're searching to see if that helps.

HTH

Steven

While there are several things in FM 7 I would love to take advantage of, what woould be the point of creating a database application where users can't (easily) read the data? I have never seen, in any application or any web browser, fonts as illegible as what Filemaker has come up with.

Very disappointing that beta testing did not flush this out. Equally disappointing that Filemaker seems to have had no response (at least to me) regarding their intentions on this issue.

FileMaker Version: 6

Platform: Windows XP