Report sizing??

[Leather Knight]

Ok, if I have a number of text fields in the report some that are quite large and some smaller, and I want to have the report "automatically" resize the field to accomodate the different texts inserted IE:

field one has 225 characters in it for report on John Doe, however has only 50 characters in the same field for Jane Doe and I want to have the field resize to accomodate the difference with out having a lot of blank space, what do I need to do?

[bcooney]

Check out Sliding w/reduce the enclosing part.

[Leather Knight]

Not sure exactly what you mean??

[Leather Knight]

This is frustrating... If in a report I have a field that has 3000 words, how do I make it print all of it and yet, if on a different one there are only 50 words, how do I make it print all of the 3000 and yet if the 50 not print all the extra space?

[Fenton]

Bcooney's answer is the essential step, but perhaps you don't even know the menu item exists. I recommend that you go to FileMaker Help, do a find for "Sliding". The 1st hit is "Removing blank spaces in printouts," with a whole page on the subject.

The basic dialog is, in Layout Mode:

Format menu > Sliding/Printing (at the bottom)

[Leather Knight]

Well, after reading on this, and playing with the fields, I get something crazy in my never to be humble opinion...lol.

I have a report with 2 fields, thank goodness it is only 2, because I have to make each field to cover 6 pages to be safe in allowing enough room for the user. And using sliding, if the user only types 50 words, in one field and 50 in the second, it all fits nicely on one page with no slack. And if the user needs 6 full pages, they have it. I made the font a size 9 and it prints very nice. So, if I have 20 fields I need to do this for, I have to script 20 scripts to work together and make 20 reports for the 20 fields if I need to allow for a lot of space in the report, whether needed or not. Interesting to say the least, but this will work. I mean, the end user doesn't care about what happens behind the scenes, just as long as they have enough space to do a full report.

Thanks, Off to script some more and see how it works.