I do database work for Madison [Wisconsin] Youth Choirs. 3 times a year, MYC sends out invoices to the parents of the kids in the choirs. Each invoice is customized for each child, showing charges of various kinds, each payment to date, amounts still due, and the normal payment schedule. (The 1st invoice of each year also contains information about how to apply for a scholarship.)
A couple of years ago, I managed to automate this process to use e-mail instead of printed paper. It was still necessary to step thru the 400 records 1 at a time, for each one generating a personalized invoice in the form of a PDF file and attaching it to a personalized e-mail message, but this was way faster and cheaper than doing it on paper. The script step that generated the PDF file was "Print", and I had set the print parameters using the Macintosh's built-in ability to print to a PDF file. The drawback to this approach was that I had no control over where the file would be saved. (I could specify whatever name I wanted, but not whatever location.) This meant that it was always a challenge when I was doing design work on one computer, the membership director was using a different computer to handle most of the mailings, and the executive director was using a 3rd computer to handle the scholarship kids. This time around, I decided to do the smart thing and bypass the "Print" command entirely and use "Save As PDF" instead. This DID allow me to specify a small flock of output file paths, and indeed that part worked like a jim-dandy, so I was initially tickled. That was until I popped open one of the PDF files generated and discovered that the MYC logo had been color reversed (black for white, cyan for red, etc.). The rest of the output was just fine — black text on white background for the most part, with some colored type and light-blue backgrounding for the financials — but the logo was not. Just in case it was a hardware problem, I tried it again with the old "Print" command, and it worked just fine, so it's something about the interaction of FMP's "Save As PDF" command and the Mac OS. It's FMP Version 9 and Mac OS version 10.6, if that's relevant. I couldn't find anything about this in the FMI Knowledge Base, so I was hoping someone here had discovered a fix.
