Splitting text for printing - Calculation

[Andrew F]

Hi,

I am new to this list ... but hope you can help.

I am trying to split a length of text into a series of 4 lines 30 characters long for printing on a label printer. Words should not split over lines.

I am using a mixture of length() and wordcount() functions, etc... which does work However, the calculations seem not to recognise text with a "," ";" "/" or other character at the end of words.

For example:

LeftWords(Credit Text, WordCount(Left(Credit Text, 30))-1), LeftWords(Credit Text, WordCount(Left(Credit Text, 30))))

where Credit Text = "Helen Turnbury, Designer: Christopher Tompkins" this code returns "Helen Turnbury, Designer" dropping the ":"

This happens wherever the last character of the last word in a selection is a non text or numeric character... it is as though these characters are not counted as part of a word.

Has anyone got any ideas how to solve this.

Thanks in advance

Andrew

[LiveOak]

Depending upon the printer driver for your particular label printer, defining the field size on the label layout should automatically wrap test. I have not used the new Dymo printers, but on the old Seikos (before they went brain dead and dropped Mac support and printer drivers in favor of a PC application) this worked fine. Have you tried this?

-bd

[Andrew F]

Hi Brent,

I am using an Intermac Easy coder C4 which uses an eltron command set... I needed thermal transfer printing and at the time could not find this on a mac supported printer. The C4 only has a PC driver....

Text does not wrap and each line is sent as a separate command through Troi Serial plug in... Only way I can figure out how to directly command the printer from the mac...

This part works well so that anything I send to printer is printed correctly... Although I am trying to install my own font on it but this is another story.

So if I can get the text split right in filemaker it will be plain sailing..... I hope.

Andrew

[LiveOak]

Understand, I've done a lot with Troi Serial and Barcode Blaster printers by hand cobbling command strings together.

I tried:

LeftWords(Credit Text, WordCount(Left(Credit Text, 30))-1) & "

[Andrew F]

Many thanks...

Will give it a go

Andrew

[Andrew F]

The solution I went with for the moment is to allow the user to edit the credit lines after it has been automatically split... this means they can correct the punctuation if needed.

This possible as is only an issue at data entry... once edited then remains fixed from then on.

Thanks for your help.