I have had a couple of customers of our Barcode Creator product ask me about printing Barcodes.  I referred them to FileMaker’s help on creating label layouts. But there are a couple of oddities about the FileMaker 13 label wizard so I thought I would cover some them in a blog and video.

Printing Barcodes

FileMaker has a New Layout Wizard that walks you through the setup of lots of different types of Layouts, from mobile layouts, to desktop layouts, to printer layouts.  Its the final one that you want to choose if you want to print labels with FileMaker. I should point that we are discussing printing sheet labels, not one at time labels with a some kind of label printer.  You can do that too, but each brand of label machine has its own specific setup, so we won’t be able to cover that here.

Oddities

The Label Wizard seems to create layouts that some how have different default styles then other layouts.  I am not sure how or why this is. But it seems to be true.  For example, a container field has a padding of 6 in the default FileMaker theme “Enlightened”. However, they have 0 padding when dropped on to a layout created by the wizard. It’s as though layouts created by the label wizard have a slightly different theme than the others.

UPDATE.  Apparently they are different themes.  Thanks to Jeremy for pointing out that there is an Enlightened Print theme on Printer Layouts.  You can see it in the video.  But I could not when I was trying to figure it out 🙂

The wizard also doesn’t handle container fields very well. If you choose to display one as part of the wizard you will get a merge field, which doesn’t help much.  It just shows the name of the file.  A merge field does a GetAsText(containerfield) before displaying.

Printing Barcodes with Numbers

The other thing I wanted to show here was how to Print Barcodes with the barcodes data on the bottom of the barcode.  This is a common requirement.  Barcode Creator doesn’t include the (number or text string) when it generates the PNG file.  It only handles the bars, not the code. But this being FileMaker it’s easy enough to stack the fields and achieve the same effect.  Check out the video for more info.

Download

Here is the example file used in the video.

BarcodePrintingDemo.fmp12

and check out Barcode Creator!