I am using FM 5 on a Windows XP platform. Can anyone help me to insert scientific symbols in a text field? (Unfortunately I cannot upgrade to a higher version of FM at this time!) Thanks.

One kludgy way is to put the notation in WORD using the insert symbol menu option, then copy and paste the result into the field in FileMaker. It is kludgy, but it does work.

Does the scientific symbol have it's own ASCII number, or it is a "normal" character that's formatted with Symbol or some other font?

I ask because a case came up some months ago where a person had formatted the letter "a" in text fields with Symbol to display as the greek letter alpha. The only problem was that whenever the field was exported, the formatting was lost and so was the alpha character. Due to the readom nature of the occurrances of the aplha character there was no way (in FMP 6 and earler) to replace the formatted "a" characters with a code of any sort.

In the end IIRC no solution was found tyo solve the problem.

The moral is: any information that relies on font formatting is prone to be lost during export.