When I zoom in or out on a layout, the data in one of the large text fields looks like it is jumbled, text on top of text

[JoniS]

If I view the layout zoomed to 100%, I see the text in one of my large text fields correctly, but any sort of zooming makes the text get crazy and unreadable.

Is there a way to fix this? What is causing it?

Thanks,

Joni

[bcooney]

Auto resize anchors?

[JoniS]

I have the default auto anchor settings on the field. (top and left)

I've attached two pictures:

- one at 100 % zoom. The text is displaying correctly.

-one at 150 % zoom. The text is garbled.

I don't know why it's acting that way and my users keep coming back to me to get it fixed... They like to zoom in larger, but this one field is unreadable when they do that.

DescriptionField__100percent.bmp

DescriptionField__150percent.bmp

[David Jondreau]

I've noticed issues with the 150% zoom specifically. Can't remember what at the moment, but certain layout objects looked "off".

[JoniS]

The text is garbled when zooming out, too.

I've attached a picture of the garbled text at 75 % zoom.

DescriptionField__75percent.bmp

DescriptionField__100percent.bmp

[iMarcW]

It's important to note that in the reduced and enlarged versions, the text is anti-aliased, and at 100 percent, it's not. I haven't seen non-anti-aliased text in Mac FileMaker for a long time.

I think it's either the combination of the FM version and OS version (update both as much as possible) or the fact that the font appears to be Geneva, an ancient Mac screen font that the OS isn't rendering correctly as anti-aliased text. Switch to Helvetica or Arial and see if that helps.

[comment]

What is the rectangle character we see scattered throughout the text? It looks like a place-holder for a non-printable or missing glyph, and I would make this my prime suspect.

[JoniS]

I have the most up-to-date version of FMPro (9.0v3).

The text in the field actually is already Ariel. Helvetica wasn't an option in my font dropdown box, so I tried Times New Roman. It fixed the text problem on the particular record I gave images for in this topic, but I still have plenty of other records that are still having the same garbled text problem. Also strange and noteworthy is that when zooming, the text no longer wraps at the end of the text field but wraps sooner with a lot of extra line breaks and really makes the whole thing look squashed.

[JoniS]

What is the rectangle character we see scattered throughout the text? It looks like a place-holder for a non-printable or missing glyph, and I would make this my prime suspect.

Good question. I don't know what those crazy characters are. I had to migrate the information in the description field from a Lotus Approach database. When I imported it into SQL, it had many different strange characters, but the text was still there...just intermingled with some strange characters...

Do you think the odd characters from the import are causing the problem? And if so, is there anything I can do to fix it? I don't know why the Lotus imports to SQL that way. It only happened with this particular text field and none of the other text fields I imported from Lotus.

[comment]

Do you think the odd characters from the import are causing the problem?

Yes, I do - and it's easy to find out if I'm right: remove them and see if the problem goes away.

And if so, is there anything I can do to fix it?

For starters, try:

Filter ( Description ; "0123456789ABC ... XYZabc ... xyz" )

[JoniS]

For starters, try:

Filter ( Description ; "0123456789ABC ... XYZabc ... xyz" )

Genius. Filtering out the strange characters fixed the garbled text.

Thank you, thank you, Comment!

[JoniS]

One more thing:

how do I keep the carriage returns (line breaks) in the text field? Because I filtered the description field without it, everything is one long sentence with no breaks.

Thanks,

Joni

[comment]

That's why I said "for starters"...

You could either add a carriage return (along with ALL permissible characters) to the list in Filter(), or preferably put the offending character in a global field and use Substitute() to take it out (I wouldn't try to paste it into the calculation formula itself - it's likely to crash the app.). Hopefully there's only one kind.

If you're still missing line-breaks, then the character is probably a Unix line feed, and you'll need to substitute it with Filemaker's ¶ carriage return.