2empowerFM Layout Painter

Layout Painter was first developed for FileMaker 7. Since then, FileMaker has added more ways to change the color of layout objects, the web viewer lets you draw graphics within its rectangle, and FileMaker 11 even has built-in graphing. All of this has greatly reduced the number of things that Layout Painter can do that aren't already built in to later FileMaker versions, leaving Layout Painter with a very small market.

At the same time, Layout Painter is one of our hardest plug-ins to maintain, requiring an enormous amount of testing and tweaking with each new FileMaker version to ensure that drawing operations remain in sync with how FileMaker handles drawing internally.

Therefore, we have reluctantly decided to discontinue active development of Layout Painter for the foreseeable future. We will continue to support existing users with updates during their first year of purchase, but potential new users should be aware that we will no longer guarantee to update Layout Painter for future FileMaker versions.

Use scripts or field values to draw lines, polygons, tabs, buttons, text, or color directly on your FileMaker® Pro database layout. Create graphs or images with triangles, pie slices, and rectangles.

Place an image of tabs in FileMaker, then use Layout Painter to recolor and draw on the image to highlight the active tab (shown to the right). The same tab image can be used in many databases and you can even create multiple images for multi-row tabs. As a bonus, you'll also get certain functions from 2empowerFM Keyboard and Mouse that let you calculate which tab was clicked and handle clicking in Preview mode.

Tabs aren't limited to static images. Layout Painter can draw tab shapes on the left, right, top, and bottom of areas. You can change each tab's color, location, and text. Can't fit as many tabs on the screen as you need? An example is included which draws a clickable arrow to show when more tabs can be scrolled into view (see picture).

In a database of flowers, you can recolor the background to match the color of each flower. In the image to the right, Layout Painter is replacing a Cancel/Reschedule button with the date of cancellation and coloring the background red so the user notices the record was canceled.

If a field is empty, draw a button over it (shown earlier), or draw light-grey instructions inside of it (shown right).

Save money and reduce waste by using partial label sheets - let users click which labels to print on in Preview mode, then draw over the preview to indicate which labels will be printed (shown right). An example is included.