On Sep 17, 2008, at 2:12 PM, David O'Donnell wrote:
A former FileMaker developer at my company managed to insert merge
fields
into a layout that were "smaller" than their field names. That is,
if the
field name was "FieldName", the merge field would normally be
inserted as
"<<FieldName>>" but he managed to make it so that the field appeared
as
"<<Fi". (The width was smaller and the height remained constant at
one line
high.) This is great when trying to put merge fields at the right hand
margin of layouts so the horizontal scrollbar doesn't constantly
show up and
mess up the appearance.
I can't for the life of me figure out how he did this, and Google is
not
being my friend when I try to search for it. Does anyone have any
super-secret tip on how to accomplish this magic? I'm designing a new
database that would benefit from it.
What others have told you is correct - it is the opening chevron that
determines the size of the merge field contents, therefore you can
format the remaining characters with a smaller point size to fit the
merge field into a smaller space. This doesn't, however, yield the
behavior of only seeing the first two or three characters of the field
name.
In all likelihood the developer renamed the field to something like
'l', placed the merge field on the layout, and then renamed the field
back to its lengthy field name. When you do this FMP does not
automatically resize the text box to accommodate the now lengthy field
name. This works, but as soon as you edit the box it resizes and you
need to rename the field to shrink it back again.
Cheers,
-corn
Corn Walker
The Proof Group
http://proofgroup.com/
