text formatting problem

[dendooven]

Dear all,

I noticed the following erroneous behaviour using FM Pro 5.0v3 on a Power Macintosh G3 running Mac OS 8.6.

I have a layout for a report which contains some text fields of my database records. In this layout, these fields have a text format specifying the font and style. However, when a field contains superscripts or subscripts, this formatting is ignored and the report shows the formatting which was used when entering the data. Does anyone know a solution to this problem ?

After submitting the above question, I found buried deep in the help files a partial answer. The behaviour I describe above seems to be not a bug but a feature... I quote from the help files: "In Layout mode, you can specify a set of text character attributes for each type of field. All the characters in that instance of the field (including all repetitions of repeating fields) share the same font, size, style, color, line spacing, tab, and paragraph settings.

Note: You can format characters in text fields in Browse mode (for example, italicize or underline a word for emphasis). Unlike text formatting specified in Layout mode, this formatting is stored with the data, and you see it in any layout that displays that field.

I agree applying special formatting in Browse mode is useful, but some types of formatting should be able to co-exist. The way FileMaker Pro works now is that e.g. superscript applied in Browse mode cannot be printed as bold in a report by specifying the formatting of the field as bold in Layout mode. Clearly, all different classes of formatting are treated in the same simplistic way, strongly limiting the ability to display the same data in different ways. I'm (obviously) not a very experienced user of FileMaker Pro, but I'm really amazed that a what I thought to be a state-of-the-art programme shows these kind of features. Has this problem been brought up before ?

Anyway, any tips and tricks concerning this are welcome. E.g. ways to automatically remove formatting which was applied in Browse mode (I don't feel like going manually through my database to do all this).

Best wishes,

Peter Dendooven

[This message has been edited by dendooven (edited October 10, 2000).]

[beltro]

FileMaker has an atricle that addresses this issue. Article number 103775 http://www.filemaker.com/support/techinfo.html

This gives you some ways to take formatting that was done in browse mode away from a field. The easies way is to create a looping script that does a set field to itself. set field 1 to field 1.

Hope this helps

Beltro

[LiveOak]

I'm sure that the decision was made to let Browse Mode formatting to override Layout Mode formatting in order to simplify the decisions FM has to make. If you try to allow both modes of formatting to exist, there are a mass of decisions that have to be made of what takes precedence over what, not all of which can be resolved. The development team probably decided to avoid the whole issue by taking the simple approach. -bd