Learning Claris FileMaker

The new PDFMarkz converts PDF files to IDML - and from there to the wider world of publishing

FileMaker Training Videos and 360Works Scribe

The 360Works Scribe plugin automates the processing of Microsoft Office and PDF files.

You can take your FileMaker data and populate Word and PDF forms, insert images onto documents, highlight changes between versions of documents, manipulate Microsoft Word and Excel tables, retrieve metadata from Excel table cells, secure PDF files, and more.

Displaying frequently referenced PDF files in a web viewer is convenient for users and adds depth and interactivity to a layout.

This article includes a simple step-by-step guide for displaying PDFs in FileMaker, as well as a backend look at why this works.

Generating PDFs in FileMaker

FileMaker Pro has had the ability to generate PDF documents since version 8, providing basic functionality that has remained largely unchanged since its introduction.

Using FileMaker Pro’s plugin architecture, we can extend this functionality to provide the following enhancements:

• Search PDF document text
• Append multiple PDF documents in non-sequential order
• Add a watermark to a PDF document
• Password protect a PDF document
• Delete pages from a PDF document
• Add clickable “Page Links” to move to different pages throughout a PDF document
• Compress a PDF file to prepare them for transmission over the internet

An intermediate to advanced FileMaker Pro developer can leverage these features to create even more dynamic PDF documents inside FileMaker Pro.

Read more on Soliant post

... this powerful plug-in provides a bidirectional data exchange between FileMaker® and Adobe® Acrobat Pro. It can:

• Insert or extract data between PDF form fields and FileMaker
• Extract text content and metadata from a PDF document directly into your FileMaker solution, eliminating the need to hand key information
• Once the data is in FileMaker, you can search through a PDF’s content and determine what page of the document the searched content appears on
• Combine and delete multiple PDF documents into a single PDF from within FileMaker Pro
• Insert any number of PDF pages anywhere into an existing PDF document
• Delete individual pages or a range of pages from a PDF
• Browse for a document from inside FileMaker
• Access, open, and save PDFs to file folders