copy & paste doesn't work.

[park-ward]

Something strange has happened when I switched from FM4 to FM7 and MacOs 9.2 to 10.4.3 : Copy & paste doesn't work from an external document or application into FM7 - but it works within FM, as well as between all other applications, it's only FM7 which bugs when I want to import data from a Word page etc, as if there were a protection somewhere. Any ideas ??

[Søren Dyhr]

What happened is that filemaker has gone Unicode UTF-16 ... Instead of copy/paste use applescript with an as <> from the word document ...BTW is Word still running in classic mode??

--sd

[park-ward]

Thanks a lot for your answer. It sounds ever so easy but it's double Dutch to me. I've never written applescripts ! Word works fine on its own, actually everything works fine, I can copy & paste between all applications except from "outside" into FM7.

C&P one field into another works fine too... but if I can't c&p from the web or any other application, life will be very hard

What did I do wrong to make FM go to Unicode UTF-16 ? -answer in plain English please ;o)

[Lee Smith]

Do you have the latest upgrade for v7.03

Lee

[park-ward]

Yes, 7.0v3

Other users tell me that they have no copy & paste problems from outside apps. I simply don't understand why c&p works from one field to another and not from an external doc. to an FM field.

Providing I can write an applescript -which I doubt very much ! what should I do with it ? Shall I have to run it every time I want to copy & paste something ?

[Søren Dyhr]

First off you haven't done anything to make filemaker unicode, it's a change in architecture kicking in from fm7 i think.

No, if it isn't a part of a script that bothers you but merely the tear and wear the users exploit or exposes a solution to, will an applescript be far fetched.

But perhaps we should be enlightened on the specific purpose, why is stuff transfered and what does the transfered stuff suffer from. Not working is way too little to go on to say it frankly - symptoms please! What version of Word are we talking about, is it running in classic mode (you didn't answer when asked before?) - it's isn't enough to tell it's working perfectly on it's own.

Say I might have Open-Office running perfectly under Ubunto Linux while my mac OS X stuff are running in a mol window ...to expect common interchange formats is far fetched and should be regarded as pure luck if it makes any sense.

Expecting this forum to be agony aunts confirming hunches of conspiracy won't get you anywhere. There are virtually hundred of reasons why a copy past fails to some extend. But we need to know when and why ....but not least any partial successes.

Such as does the field receive something but it looses some of it's formatting but not all, in one end ....and receives something not readable somewhere in between not receiving anything at all with a filemaker error message popping up as the other extreme.

The last could be a design issue for the particular database, are you in charge of the development? Passwords or wrong field formats can be the reason.

--sd

[comment]

I can copy and paste from Word 5.1a, running in Classic, to FMP 7 with no problems.

More details would be useful here: can you c/p from Word to TextEdit? And from TextEdit to FMP? Are we talking about English or is another language involved here?

[Lee Smith]

I can copy/paste with lots of things running too.

Do you have enough memory on this machine?

Have you tried shutting down. Wait one minute. than restarting.

Lee

[park-ward]

All my "stuff" runs under Tiger, my Word software is v.11 (Office 2004) ; I have 1Gb of RAM and as I said before, c/p works between ALL my applications and within ALL my applications.

The only exception is c/p from ANY application into an FM7 page. The 'copy' action works - because I can paste the contents anywhere else - but the 'paste' action only triggers a short flash of the edition menu at the top of the screen.

I tried all my databases that have migrated from FM4 and they all suffer from the same c/p problem.

I built a test tabel with just one texte field and again, I couldn't paste anything into it.

All other actions of the edition menu work fine. (including insert date, time etc..)

I've reinstalled FM7 from scratch but it made no difference.

May be the quick way out would be to buy the FM8 upgrade !!

[comment]

No, this is very strange. When you "paste", is the field empty afterwards? (Make a calc field of IsEmpty (theField), and see if it changes from 1 to 0.) What happens if you Option-Paste? You haven't answered my question about the language.

And of course, you should run Disk Utility and repair the disk's permissions.

[park-ward]

When I paste, the field remains unchanged. (if there's some text, it stays there, if there isn't, it remains empty.)

The language is English for the text and French for Tiger.

I tied option-Paste and IT WORKED !!!

I LOVE YOU BRILLIANT PEOPLE....

[comment]

Sounds like a font issue - the font of the copied text is not recognized by FMP. Easy to verify: open TextEdit, type something, select it, change the font to Lucida Grande, copy it. I think this should paste into FMP without Option?

[park-ward]

I tried what you advised, but it didn't work without the option key. I'll fiddle with my mouse settings to obtain the correct key combination. Again, many thanks for your help. This damned silly small thing was going to slow my inputting work to my limited keyboard virtuosity.

I won't dig the problem by lack of time, but it could be the old story of extensions conflict.

[comment]

I don't think so - there are no extensions in OS X. I don't know about the French Tiger, there could be incompatibility there, but I rather doubt it. One thing definitely worth checking is your FMP preferences, under Fonts.

[park-ward]

You're right again !! I thought I'd tried all the settings before, but obviously I hadn't. I checked both options and bingo ! Kuddos again.