Copying Layouts

[uemtux]

Hi Everyone,

I wrote a small filemaker tool to help me manage print jobs. In my solution, employees of my company often wanted to combine several print jobs into one job, so I created a tool for them.

My tool relies on the fact that, in Preview Mode, if you execute the "Copy[]" script step with no parameters the entire contents of the layout are copied to the clipboard. My script copies various reports and pastes them into 8.5 x 11 container fields in another table. Then we find all the pages of the job in this table and print them.

My problem is that this script is somewhat unreliable. I'm printing a 2 page job using this system, and the first page shows up, the second page is blank. I don't get an error code when copying the second page, but it doesn't seem to be making it to the clipboard either. Also, this doesn't always happen, do a different job and you'll get all the pages.

So I guess my question is, what circumstances might prevent Filemaker from copying layouts when in preview mode?

[uemtux]

I just wanted to add that the problem seems to have been some kind of font conflict. When the script put my report in preview mode, I stopped it in the debugger. The first page I was able to manually copy and paste into Gimp, no problem, so far so good. The second page, the Copy command was greyed out of the edit menu! Okay, hmm... I page back to page 1, then back to page 2, the Copy command has lit up! I copy, paste, and it works but... the fonts are all wrong.

So I surmised the problem was rooted in some kind of Font issue. I went out and purchased "FontDoctor" from extensis.com and ran it. It got rid of a bunch of duplicate fonts and fixed some other problems and now there's no more issue.

[bruceR]

Note that the native OSX utility Font Book can identify and remove duplicates.

[Vaughan]

The copy-in-preview trick has been around since FMP 4 or 5, possibly earlier. Back then it was the only way to do such things. I set up a huge doc management system using such a system.

The Save as PDF and Append options have IMHO replaced the copy trick. They are more reliable and work better cross-platform, are faster and easier to implement because the process does not deal with individual pages.

You'd print the first report to pdf to a known location, then append the other reports to the same pdf. When the last one is done open the pdf for the user to view.