Manually Insert Forced Page Breaks

[Dana G]

I would like to know if there is a way to manually insert forced page breaks like those that can be inserted when using MS Word.

I have a layout with a header and title header. the little dotted lines that are supposed to represent the page are severly skewed when those two parts are added. I have to flip back and forth between Layout and Preview modes and move the fields up and down and it is getting very annoying and slow. It's also very tiring to finally get the fields on the right page only to have the top margins vary from page to page.

I am not opposed to a work around but I don't want it visible to the end user.

Any help would be appreciated!!

[Vaughan]

No, there are no manual page breaks in FMP. However there are a couple of things you can do that might help...

1) Set the layout margins to a fixed size, this may stabilise the top margins moving around. (Top margins may also move around, at least for the first and second pages, if the layout has a title header part on it that is a different size to the normal header part.)

2) Creat the diffrent pages as separate layouts, then script the print process to serially switch between them when printing. Usually the forst Print step is issued with the dialog prompt, the subsequent print steps are issued without dialog.

[Dana G]

I have tried in the past to work with the fixed page margins and I can't find anything that tells me what the minimums are. I can set them to be .25 inch and it tells me that it's too small and some fields may be clipped. If I set them all to .33 inch it allows the numbers but shrinks the layout to be smaller than the original default. I just get confused when I try to work with them and ultimately end up going back and turning them off.

[Oldfogey]

Dana, I have been wrestling with a similar problem. You have my sympathy, which I know is a lot of help.

By definition, you are going to have different size Bodies when you use a Title Header.

Re margins, that is part of your printer specifications, although, for some strange reason some modern printers do not come with proper specs.

[Vaughan]

Generally printers have a 5mm or 1/4 inch non-printing area around the page, except for inkjet printers that hace about 12mm 1/2 inch margin at the botttom of the page.

Regarding fixed page margins, I use them in two ways:

1) set all margins to zero, and position the text blocks and fields with some room on the layout to simulate margins.

2) set the page margins to 1/2 inch all the way around and put the field and text objects right to the edge of the layout page edges.

Note that FMP 8.0v2 currently has a bug when printing fixed margin layouts (though I haven't been bitten by it yet) but FMI has uncharacteristically announced it will be fined in an upcoming 8.0v3 update.

[Oldfogey]

Vaughan,

Your info about page margins is a little out of date. Some modern inkjets can print without any side margins. Some older ones had restrictions about printing less than 1.5 inches above the bottom edge. (Although, on the only one I ever used with this restriction, it seemed quite happy with smaller margins.)

Can you be more specific about the bug re fixed paged margins? Symptoms? (I've done a search here but no luck.)

[Vaughan]

Paul

There is a TechInfo article about it:

http://filemaker.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/filemaker.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=5907

"When printing from Windows based clients, layouts that use fixed margins will experience a shifting of the image by several pixels."

[Oldfogey]

Thanks for that.

Not really relevant to my problem but could well be related under the cover.

(Stiff not printing.)