The way to print the records displayed in a portal is to build a layout based on the child table that “owns” the records in the portal, and do your printing there. The field on the layout can display the entire value. Dates, social security numbers, state abbreviations and zip codes, and many other data types are basically fixed lengths or nearly so.

The dollar (number) fields in my invoicing and banking databases, alas, don’t ever need to store very large values.

Many of the fields in a database store values (content) that don’t exceed a certain length. There are two very special cases that definitely want their own layouts for printing: portals and large text fields.

I use Verdana a lot for onscreen display, but for reports, I use Helvetica Neue on the Mac or Arial, which is a good font for cross-platform viewing. Such fonts usually do not look so good in print. Verdana and Georgia, for example, are two fonts designed specifically to be viewed on screen. Third, certain fonts are better for viewing on screen than they are for printing, and vice versa. A data-entry layout with a number of user-interface elements such as buttons, tabs, and portals, can be printed, but the result is going to be ugly.

Filemaker pro 15 format text field