Creating and Modifying Forms

You can create or modify forms using the Form Editor either by importing a page layout from the Application Designer or by manually adding objects to the page definition. If you import a page layout from the Application Designer, the entire contents of the form definition are replaced by the imported page definition.

Access the Form Editor page (Set Up SACR, and then Common Definitions, and then Forms Engine, and then Set Up, and then Form Editor, and then Form Editor).

Select Set Page Device to force the form to start on a new piece of paper. This is important when you are duplex printing (printing on both sides of the paper). If you do not select Set Page Device, a new form might print on the backside of a piece of paper.

You can add types of objects to forms such as Box, Data Field, Image, Line, Long Text, and Text. You can set attributes for each of these objects such as color, font, position, length, style, scale, spacing, justification, line thickness, dashes, image ID, and literal text. Not all attributes apply to all form child objects. You can specify to have sample text values appear in data fields when you preview the form.

To preview the form that you are editing, click the Preview link. This saves any unsaved changes, generates the PostScript print data stream, and sends the data to your browser. If your browser is configured to display this type of data, it displays the image of the form. If your browser is not configured to display this type of data, you can save the data to a disk directory. If you save the data to a disk directory and give it a file name, give it a (.ps) extension indicating that it is a PostScript file. Copy this file to a postscript printer. The page image renders graphically to that printer.

If you want to view the PostScript preview page image on your browser, click the Get PostScript Viewer link on the Form Editor page. The system displays a website where you can obtain a PostScript View program.