Working with Fonts

In the last few days I worked on my template database again. I use it as a storage place and work of reference of ideas, features, and solutions I developed with FileMaker. It includes a basic collection of custom functions, default scripts for trigger management, and design samples.

Designing a good looking layout is a challenge in itself. But when you try to use the same layout in both worlds, Mac OS and MS Windows, raises the challenge quite a bit. Main problems are the font. There are only few fonts available in both systems. But having the same name does not make it the same font. Text formatted in the same font might have different width and height – resulting in really ugly layouts.

There are different ways to redress these problems:

• Oversize all labels and fields
• Use conditional formatting
• Use hidden tab controls for each operating system
• Create separate layouts for each operating system

Often, you will use a mixture of different solutions. But to master these challenges you should know a little bit about the fonts in Mac OS and MS Windows.
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A portal is a window to a related table. When you create a portal, you define the related table and the number of rows to be shown. Besides some other options you can also decide, whether the portal shall have a vertical scroll bar. Unfortunately FileMaker does not offer a direct way to change this option during run-time.

The size of the portal – and therefore the number of rows – may change at run-time. This will happen when you set vertical autosize option for the portal. Changing the height of the layout window will also change the size of the portal. There is no FileMaker function to get the number of actual visible portal rows. Even with such a function, you can not turn off the scroll bar when fewer records are shown in the portal.

To overcome this problem, I wrote two custom functions. These functions and a invisible object create an effect that will hide the portal scroll bar when fewer records than available portal rows are shown.

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