I'm assuming these aren't possible.

Say I have one layout with certain content, then I have a script go to the next layout.

If I set the background colour of the second layout to transparent, presumably it just shows a white background, and not the contents of the previous layout.

Is that a feature in filemaker 7?

I'm assuming there aren't any plugins to change this as the FileMaker layout system seems a pretty integrated and hardcore aspect of filemaker.

Is it possible?

Just to save copying a section of layout objects into 20 other layouts every time I make a change.

Thanks

Transparent layouts are not possible. Just copy and paste new objects. If you haven't already discovered this, the T-Square tool is handy for aligning objects from one layout to another.

Have never even noticed the t-square tool!

Fantastic. Certainly makes it easier to copy and paste anyway!

I guess just group all the objects I want to be consistent then just copy them.

Maybe transparent layouts could be a feature for filemaker 8?!

Thanks for the suggestion

With FMP, each window (except for dialog boxes) displays a layout. The layouts are not overlayed upon each other, they are switched; so only one layout is ever displayed in a window at a time. (Think of changing channels on your TV, you switch between them not overlay them.)

Let's suppose you could make a transparent layout. What would appear in the window: the OS desktop, the FMP window underneath, or nothing (BWT what colour is "nothing" is it black or white or grey)? Neither of these options makes sense from an interface perspective, nor from within the framework of the windowing GUI.

Returning to the TV analogy, there is no sense in making one TV channel transparent and having it display over top of another channel: the resulting image would be unviewable. There is a use for the "picture-in-picture" interface where a second channel is displayed in the corner of the screen but that's analogous to having multiple windows.