My office recently upgraded to FileMaker Pro 9, and for the most part it works great. The only problem we are having is that the print menu no longer works properly.

The problem is this: regardless of which printer is selected from the Print menu, FM prints to the printer last selected in the Print Setup menu.

This means that when anyone wants to change which printer they are printing to, they have to go into the Print Setup menu and select the printer there before going to actually print their records/layouts. Since most of us print some things in color, and some things in black and white, we need to change printers quite often.

I'll detail what I have attempted to solve this problem so far.

The first thing I tried was creating a script to print, rather than using the menu. I had exactly the same problem though. No matter what printer I selected in the script, it printed to the printer last chosen in the Print Setup menu. Since that didn't work, I tried creating a script to change the Print Setup. Again, it did not work. The script did nothing. In fact, if I selected a new printer, saved the script, and examined it... the old printer was selected again.

Every other aspect of using scripts or the Print menu to print works, just not printer selection. I can select whether to print the current record, or records being browsed. I can change the number of copies, or which pages to print. I can not print to a different printer than the one selected in the Print Setup menu.

This is a problem that persists across every client in the office, for every database, every printer. If anyone knows how to fix this, or even just why it is happening, I would greatly appreciate your input. Thanks.

It's a known bug. Lookup in the Filemaker knowledgebase to see if you have the problem that results from printer names that exceed 30 characters.

See this Link

Thanks for the fast response. When I was searching for solutions I did find that page, but there's a note at the bottom:

Note: The issue is fixed in FileMaker Pro 9 when printing from the file menu (File > Print). Printing via a script remains an issue.

Our office is using FileMaker Pro 9.0.3, and printing from the File > Print menu still does not work correctly. I haven't tried the IP printer solution yet though, and I will give it a shot tomorrow when I have more time.

On windows, if you print without dialog filemaker will print to the system default. I have taken to using a combonation of VBS and filemaker scripts to change all the defualts (System default, filemaker default, and filemaker file default) for my solution before printing. to a new printer.

On windows, printing to multiple printers from filemaker without the use of print dialogs is a challange to say the least. I have posted an example of how I do this on the forums. Do a search of the forums and you should find it.