Bullet points?

[Nanore]

Hello, I've searched this forum as well as the FileMaker Developer forums, and it would appear that I am the first and only person to ever inquire about "bullet points".

My question is actually very simple. I've got a word processing document in a word processor. It contains text. Some portions of the text have bullet points. Where the bullet points are, the text is automatically indented. Very basic, standard, nothing fancy going on. I want to transfer this bullet-formatted text onto a Filemaker layout. In my word processor, I select-all, copy, mosey on over to FileMaker, Layout mode, Text tool, click in the layout, and Paste. The text comes on over. So does most of the formatting, including bolding, great! However, the Bullets are gone. Booooo.

I can manually re-enter bullets using option-8 and option-shift-8, and manually indent the text with tabs to "fake it". This is not a good solution because the moment anything changes, the whole thing is thrown out of whack.

Is there a way to get real bullet points with real indentation?

Thanks in advance!

[comment]

Is there a way to get real bullet points with real indentation?

Yes, there is - type them. If there were REAL bullet points in your original text, they would have come over. I am slightly guessing here, but it looks like those bullets are generated in Word "on-the-fly" due to paragraph formatting.

[Nanore]

Thanks for taking the time to reply, comment.

Yes, the bullet points and enumeration were generated on-the-fly by the word processor.

Your suggestion does solve half my problem -) Yes, I can manually type the bullets and manually type the indentations.

However, the most difficult problem still remains:

When manually typing bullet points and using the tab on each line key to create indentation, with the text tool in layout mode, the results are very unreliable.

The moment anything changes (slightly different font, slightly different font size, etc. etc), the whole thing gets thrown out of whack and is useless. You end up with tab gaps in the middle of paragraphs, and no more indentation.

Because the file will be opened on many different operating systems, each one will have an ever-so-slightly different version of the "same" font, and each time, this breaks the manually added tabbing scheme.

If there was automatic indenting applied to bullet points, that would solve the problem. (Just like a regular word processor does).

Any suggestions?

So far the only workaround I've come up with is to make a PDF from within the word processor, then embed that PDF as a "Picture" on the Filemaker layout. It works, everything stays formatted correctly, it's portable, and it prints well. But that's not a very elegant way to accomplish the task.

[Fenton]

I think a lot of this depends on your secretarial skills (mine are so-so). For one thing, do NOT introduce line breaks artificially because "it makes the tabs work". I've seen a lot of this. That is almost sure to break. If you use the 1st line indent tool, and real tabs, and set the tabs with the text ruler properly, things should reflow OK. It depends.

[comment]

Filemaker is not a word processor. That said, it does have pretty good tools for text formatting, not much less than a real word processor. I am not sure why you should get tab gaps in the middle of paragraphs, if you set up your tabs carefully (you do know you can set tabs on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, I hope). In any case, you would have the same problems passing a Word file between systems, no?

[Nanore]

In fact, the original file passes perfectly between iWork on the Macs and MS Office in the WinXP and Vista machines, no issues with the original document formatting because both word processors recognize and support full Bullet Point functionality - not just manually typed ones as suggested to me earlier.

It's only when attempting to place the data into FM do we lose the official Bullet Points functions (and the automatic indentation and alignment that comes along with them), I'm told there likely has to be calculation(s) in FileMaker to emulate the same functionality - My buddy Fenton probably has the answer... -)

[comment]

I see no difference between a manually bulletted list and an automatic one, in terms of the final result.

[Nanore]

I agree, there should be little or no difference between a manually bulleted text or an automatic one in terms of how it appears in the final product.

The difference lies in creating it.

Automatic = half a second of time and effort. No calculations are necessary.

Manual = much more than half a second of time and effort. Custom calculations are necessary.

-)

Edited August 19, 2008 by Guest

[comment]

Yes, it takes more time to set it up manually. No custom calculations are involved in this, just a bit of "secretarial skills" (I still remember doing this in a word processor, before automatic list formatting became available). Filemaker is not a word processor - but now we're going in circles.