Hello,

Im having a strange problem here, I would be very grateful if someone could help. Here is a description:

- I have a database composed of 2209 records. It is a Chinese characters database, with 11 fields. The first one has the character in its normal form, the second the simplified form, the third one the pinyin transcription, the fourth one a translation in French and so on. It is an old database, which went through different software during the last few years. It has a dozen layouts, different fonts and stuff. So far, it works very fine inside FileMaker, and when printing (PDF or paper)

- I need to export the data to a text editor. So I select 'Export Records...' in the File menu. Then 'Tab-Separated Text', then I chose a Field export order, UTF-16 as 'Output file character set', and here we go

- When I open the .tab file in the text editor, everything looks perfect except that some records are missing??? Like only two-third of the database has been exported. I have the records 1 to 6, then the 7 is omitted, then records 8-13, then 14 and 15 are missing and so on

I have checked all the options, tried to export in Excel format (same problem), or compared the records to see if the missing ones have common characteristics but I didn't find a clue.

Any advice mucho appreciated. (All the records have been selected before exporting, and I didn't select any particular option. To me it feels more like a bug inside FileMake, e.g. there is an invisible formatting in some records which prevent them from being exported normally).

Im using a PowerBook 1.33gz, on OSX 10.4.9, FileMakerPro 8.0v3.

Best to all,

Basile

I just found a clue:

- if I 'Export Files' in Excel format, the same records are missing

- if I 'Save Records' as Excel file, all the records are in there

?

Quite possibly the tab export format cannot handle the unicode characters. Also, returns and tabs in fields can stuff-up the export since these characters are used as column and row delimiters.

So what do you see when you look at the records that are missing?