I have a laout that has a body in it that I have stretched over 4 pages. In the body are 4 different fields, each with a text header (not a layout part header, just dumb text). I stretched the body out becuase some field contents in the body could potentially get quite long, so I wanted to give myself some room.

The problem is, when I put in some lengthy test data into the text fields, the text line at the bottom of the page can get sliced in half and continued on the next page. Also, depending on the length of some of the fields, the text header can be orphaned at the bottom of the page and the field will just begin at the top of the next page. That's bad.

So, how can I avoid slicing of text in a field that breaks across pages; and, is their some way of not letting feilds break across pages if that break will occur in the first couple lines?

I know the second part is a long shot but I have to ask. Thanks in advance.

Chris

There may be an easier way than this, but this is what I have done:

If you will be printing to different printers, go to the Layout setup dialog and select "fixed page margins." Set the top and bottom margin values to the give a print area equal to or slightly smaller than the printer that has the smallest print area.

Make sure that sliding is disabled for the field that crosses the page. Then, by trial and error, move the field up or down until the page break coincides with the bottom of a text line. Also, make sure that if you have both a title header and a regular header, that they are both exactly the same size or else that the difference in size is an exact multiple of text line heights in your field that crosses the page.

I know this is messy but I haven't found a better way to do this. Maybe someone else out there has a better idea.

I also have the same issue with text getting cut into pieces between the bottom of the first page and the top of the second. I have several large fields that can contain more than one paragraph each, so my layout stretches across several pages. I am using slide printing to remove the white space and that seems to be working okay, but when you reach that magical length among these large fields and the record gets spanned a crossed more than one page the data may sliced into two pieces in the middle of a line.

Maybe a paperless work environment would be the answer.

Any other ideas or suggestions?

Actually, where I said not to allow sliding on the field that crosses the page, that wasn't quite right. You can set it to slide so that it will reduce the white space and eliminate unnecessary pages as long as the top of the field is butted up against an immovable object. That way, the field can shrink, but not slide. I have this set up for my office correspondence database which I use for writing business letters and faxes which can be up to 5 pages long. the bodytext field is stretched across 5 pages and will shrink to a single page if the amount of text is small enough. I got it to work, but it required a bit of fooling around to get it that way.

In Filemaker 4, there is a simple, hidden funcion, that will solve your problem. Go to layout mode, hold down the shift-key (windows) or alt-key (macintosh) while you select the menu "layout options" (where you can also set the page margins). You get a special checkbox (in german it's called "Neuer Umbruch", so in english it could be called "new pagebreak" or something like that..). If you check this box, the page break is always between the text lines. However, this is not working with portals, and in Filemaker 5 I didn't find this funcition at all...

Gerd

You might also try merge fields - they seem to break between text lines better than regular fields do.