Update 4 Sep 2012: Preliminary testing indicates that the “line swallowing bug” alluded to below has been fixed in FileMaker 12. Also, in FM 12, the maximum layout length and width have been increased to 444 inches (32,000 pt).
There was a time, many years ago, when the maximum number of characters you could store in a FileMaker text field was 64,000. With the introduction of FileMaker 7 in 2004, that limit was expanded to approximately one billion characters (2 Gb of data divided by 2 bytes per Unicode character), i.e., more than you or I will typically ever need.
But while the capacity of a text field expanded astronomically, the maximum length of a layout remained unchanged at 110 inches (ten 8.5 x 11 inch pages), leading to a dichotomous situation where FileMaker can store vastly more data in a field than it can easily preview, print or output to PDF.
For example, let’s say you’ve decided to build a data warehouse for public domain literary works. Continue reading “Long Documents in FileMaker 11”