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Printing Forms
Print View
All are printable. By selecting a form's printable checkbox a print icon will be displayed at the top of your form. When the form is used and the printer icon is clicked the form is rendered in a new browser tab and a pdf document is generated and downloaded depending on your browser settings. The name of the pdf file will be <form name>.pdf. The form pdf file can then be printed.
The Printable property is checked by default. If you un-check this property then the control will not appear in the printed view. This property can also be set dynamically via a business rule by setting <control>.printable = [true|false].
If you are trying to make the print view of a table control in your form consistent with the browser view, set the column widths explicitly at either the column cell level or at the table level.
The Print icon works differently for forms in a workflow. You will have to add a message control on the flow step where you wish to see the print button. See below for the details.
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Submission PDF
Form submissions can be converted to PDF (tiff, png, jpeg) documents. The PDF document can be saved in ' Submission Repository, sent as an attachment to a submission email, or as an attachment to a POST to a back-end system such as a document management system.
The Form and Doc Action Wizards for email and post submission control whether or not the form is converted to a PDF document (or other image types such as tiff, png, jpg...) and attached to the submission. You can control which form fields are added to the PDF via the printable property on each field in your form.
Page Breaks
Page breaks can be added to the print view by adding the special f-page-break to any control's CSS Class property. Any control with f-page-break will start at the top of new page. In the example below, the Room Information tab prints on a new page.
Do not use the f-page-break css class in table cells.
International Characters for Print View and Submission PDFs
Support for international characters in PDFs (Print View) and submissions can be implemented with a work-around using a custom theme. The customized theme will ensure the correct font-family is in place so Internationalization (i18n) fonts will be used in Print View and when you check Save PDF on your form for submissions.
A Unicode font with broad language support is recommended.
Follow the steps below to create a custom theme that will support multiple Unicode character sets:
- Stop the Live Forms server
- Uncompress/expand the frevvo.war file to a temporary location on your desktop. This is typically located here: <frevvo-home>/tomcat/webapps/frevvo.war.
- Add your font file (unifont.tff file is an example) to the WEB-INF/fonts directory.
- Re-WAR to create a new updated frevvo.war file.
- Replace the original frevvo.war file with the new updated frevvo.war file, typically located here: <frevvo-home>/tomcat/webapps/frevvo.war.
- Re-start your Live Forms server.
- Download one of Live Forms global themes (for example, nouveau blue or nouveau) and save the zip file to your desktop.
- Unzip the zip file to a temporary location.
- Add css code to the form.css file - Here is an example of the css code using a free bitmap font (unifont). It is possible more code will need to be added to cover additional control types:
.s-print form { font-family: unifont; } .s-print .f-form label { font-family: unifont; } .s-print .f-input .input, .s-print .f-select1 .select, .s-print .f-select1 .textarea, .s-print .f-select .textarea, .s-print .f-textarea .textarea { font-family: unifont; }
- Zip the files back as they were.
- Upload the zip file to Live Forms as an Application or Designer Theme by clicking the New icon on the appropriate screen.
- Create a new form and choose the custom theme from the new form wizard (or if you are editing an existing form, replace the current theme with your newly customized theme).
- Check Save PDF on the Form Property panel.
- Test the form with international translations.
- Print View and form submission PDFs should be generated with international characters.
The image below shows a portion of a pdf generated from a form with a few controls tested with Chinese translation.
Custom Print Button
All forms automatically have a print icon at the top of the form. You can hide the print button by deselecting the forms' printable property in the form designer. If you need to add a print button anywhere other than at the top of the form, you can do so by following these steps:
- Add a message control to your form
- Add the following HTML to your message control
<center> <a title="Print this form" href="?print=true&format=pdf" class="f-tb-print"><span id="f-form-tb-print-span">Print PDF</span></a> </center>
The same technique above can also be used for forms in workflows. In the case of a workflow the "Print PDF" will print the currently visible workflow step and not the combination of all the steps in the workflow.