Printing Problems in Windows

[airbaal]

Many of my clients have been having a major problem with FileMaker Pro 5.0v1 & v3 on the Windows platform and I hope somebody can help.

I have a printout that has a sliding text field in the body of the printout, and it is set to remove the blank spaces if the whole box is not filled with text. There can be anywhere from 40-200 records in the body of the printout, so this sliding text field essentially has to be processed 40-200 times.

My clients can preview the information just fine, but when they go to print, sometimes an error occurs:

[fishma]

I have experienced the same problem in the past but could never get the skinny on why the error occurs.

My work around is using a calculated text field to display my information. I create a field which concatenates the information into a single field formatted the way I want it to look. It's a simple If/Then calculation (If IsEmpty(...)) The field does not take very long to create and the final product is very elegant.

It's just a suggestion... Good luck on your solution.

Fishma!

[airbaal]

Thanks for the reply. I just talked to a client today and he is having problems printing a SIMPLE printout which is basically two one-line calculated fields in the body of the layout. The computer just completely freezes up, on Windows ME. Even after downloading new printer drivers for his HP. Other people get that page fault error I mentioned in my previous post, while others freeze. It's funny how the ONLY thing different in my code is the Preview or Print[] command. It doesn't hang on Previewing, only Printing. It makes me feel like my solution sucks, but it is FileMaker and not me. I swear :-)

Any one with any ideas? This is starting to be a killer of a problem.

Thanks,

Eric

[danjacoby]

Windows Me (yeah, that's the correct capitalization) is supposed to be less stable than any Windows version since the parting of the Red Sea. Dunno if that's part of the problem, but you never know.

FMP is a remarkably stable software product; I'm loath to blame it when other things could be at fault.

[airbaal]

Trust me, I blame Windows & Microsoft whenever possible :-)

But this problem happens just as often in Windows 98 & 98 SE with updated printer drivers. I am more frustrated then anything. It previews fine, but does not print and instead crashes. You reboot, then it runs fine for a while, then crashes.

I've redesigned the layout from scratch, and still no luck. And when I think the problem is fixed, all the sudden it starts coming up again.

Frustrating, to say the least...

Eric

[peterlacenne]

Hi,

You are not alone with this very big problem. All of our customers have the same printing problem in user.exe and kernel32.dll.

This problem give us headache. Did you try to contact FM inc. for a tech support on this issues ?