The print designer allows the Ebase user to design the content, layout and appearance of print output associated with Ebase forms based on a canvas on which each page is drawn. To access the print designer from the form editor, select Form > Show Print Form Design from the menu at the top of the designer or type Ctrl P which acts as a toggle switch between the form editor and the print designer.

To create a new print form, click on create new print form icon on the toolbar and enter a name in the pop-up window. Note that print form names are case sensitive. The print designer should look like the following:

Adding, Removing and Reordering Pages

Any number of pages can be constructed for an Ebase form. The Show pages tab on left of designer will show large page thumbnails and maintenance of these can be carried out by right-clicking. This allows the Ebase user to add and delete pages. Reordering can be carried out by cutting an existing page and pasting into a new position.

Print Page Properties

The print page properties can be accessed by right-clicking on the page.

The Canvas

During print design only one page may appear on the canvas but other pages can be shown by clicking on the appropriate page in the left pane. Absolute positioning of elements on the form can be achieved by use of a grid as described below. Zoom in and out is possible by use of these icons.

Configuring the Grid layout

This can be achieved by clicking on the icon in the print designer. Select Snap to Grid to restrict any object you move or draw to the increments of the grid. This option is useful for positioning objects accurately and consistently in the Presentation window. To turn off this option, select Snap to Grid again. The grid resolution can be set in increments of ticks per inch 2/4/8/16. It may be desirable to work without a grid so provision is made for this possibility.

Adding Drawing Elements to a Print Page

To access the following drawing elements, click on the icons in the print form toolbar or right-click on the canvas and click Add….

Form field (presented as either text field, text area, check box, check box list)

Table

Line

Rectangle

Text

Image

Page number

Total number of pages

Date

Barcode

Adding basic drawing elements from the toolbar

When an "add" operation has been selected, the cursor changes into a hand and the mouse behaviour changes to rubber-banding. The user can then draw the bounding box for the element on the canvas. When the shape has been specified for the element, a dialog box may appear asking the user to provide further configuration for the element. For example, asking to select an image file for an image element or a table field for a table element.

Adding form fields onto the page

Form fields can be added to a page using the form field wizard. This wizard allows the Ebase user to select the page from which you want to add fields. It then presents the list of fields appearing on that page. The Ebase user can then choose the fields they want to place on the page and the presentation style they want for each field's value element. They can also chose whether the wizard should generate text elements for the texts associated with each selected field.

When OK is clicked, the wizard generates label, input and info elements as selected and places them in a default grid in the top left-hand corner of the page ready for the Ebase user to reposition and resize as required. Label text elements will always be generated if requested regardless of whether they contain text or not. Info text elements will only be generated if text already exists. Once created, these text and input elements can then be manipulated and modified independently.

Adding Barcodes

By clicking the symbol a typical dialog box will be presented as follows:

A selection of barcodes can be added to a page. Different bar codes encode different character sets. Some only encode digits 0-9 and others allow lower case alphabetical characters, upper case alphabetical characters, special characters and occasionally the full ASCII set (See the references at the end of this section for full descriptions of all bar code formats). To support all the possible combinations, the barcode wizard allows the Ebase user to compose the barcode from two different possible sources:

The Form UID - This is a unique numerical identifier for the Ebase form which can be subsequently used to identify the form during scanning
User Data Field - This can be any simple form field (excluding tables and buttons) from which the user-supplied value is taken at runtime and encoded into the bar code.

A separator character may also be specified to allow demarcation between the two parts of the code if both Form UID and user data are used.

The Ebase user can chose to use the FormUID, user data or both. If only one is used, the value is encoded on its own. If both are chosen, the specified separator character is inserted in between as follows:

The barcode's code is typically displayed underneath the barcode (for all barcode formats which support this). When configuring the barcode, the user will also be required to specify the number of characters to be used for each part of the code. If the data to be used for that part of the code is shorter than the number of characters specified, the code will be left-padded with '0's. So, for example, if just the Form UID is being used and its value is 945, and the length of the Form UID part of the code is specified as 5 digits, the actual code to be encoded will be 00945.

Barcodes are generated at the recommended size depending on the encoding used since this is required for successful scanning. Standard barcode attributes such as bar heights, widths, ink spreading etc may all be configured in the designer.

Note: In some cases, it may not be possible to render the barcodes on the canvas. In such cases, an outline of the region to be occupied by the barcode is displayed with the code text underneath. In all cases, running the print form in test mode will display the barcode in its PDF form as it will be printed.

For more details on barcode formats see the following references:

Element Actions

Various actions may be carried out on elements and these are described below.

Select

An element may be selected by clicking within the body of that element. This is also true of element labels. To select multiple elements hold down the CTRL key whilst selecting.

Move

When selected, elements may be moved to new positions on the canvas simply by dragging with the mouse.

Group / Ungroup

It is possible to group together a number of related elements so that actions may be carried out on all of them at the same time. To do this, select the elements to be grouped together, right-click and then select “Group” from the menu screen. Ungrouping is carried out by right-clicking in the group and selecting “Ungroup”. Alternatively you can use the group icon and ungroup icon on the toolbar.

Resize

Elements may be resized by first selecting the element to be resized and then moving the mouse pointer until the pointer changes shape. Resizing may then be carried out by left clicking and dragging.

Ordering

When a PDF form is generated, the drawing elements are drawn onto the PDF page from back to front. Hence the ordering of elements is important when elements overlap. The print designer provided and ordering facility which allows elements to be moved towards the front or sent towards the back to allow overlaps to be displayed as desired.

A special case is texts which always appear on top regardless of whether they appear to be obscured on the canvas. This is a feature of the PDF rendering software and is outside the scope of the Ebase Designer. However it is not expected that text will ever be designed to be obscured on a print page since this would render the text redundant so this should never be an issue.

In order to display the menu to control this facility, right-click from within the target element and navigate to “Order…”

Cut, Copy & Paste

In order to move or copy elements between pages it is possible to right-click within the body and select Cut, Copy or Paste to achieve the desired effect.

Undo & Redo

Undo and Redo icons are available in the Print Design toolbar so that recently carried out actions may be reinstated.

Element Styles

All elements support drawing styles including:

Line style - solid, dashed (various)
Line width
Line colour and transparency
Fill colour and transparency
Text style - font/size/bold/italic/underline
Text colour
Text alignment
Text padding - top/bottom/left/right

Styles may be applied to elements as required. If a single drawing element is selected, the style dialog box will only present the style attributes which are relevant for that element. If multiple different drawing elements are selected. The style dialog box will present the union of all style attributes supported by all the selected drawing elements. Any changes made in the style dialog box and applied to the selection will only affect the elements that support the changed attribute.

For example, if a rectangle and a text element are selected and the border colour is set to blue, both the rectangle and the text area will have their border colour set to blue. Alternatively, for the same selection, if the font is set to bold, only the text element will be affected and its font will be emboldened.

The style editing dialog box provides a 'preview' function which allows the Ebase user to make incremental changes to a style, preview those changes while still keeping the style dialog box open and then either accept the changes or cancel them and leave the selected elements unchanged.

Master Pages

In order to allow items to be defined which appear on all pages such as headers, footers, backgrounds, watermarks and so on, a master page facility is provided. The master page designer appears as just another canvas on which the Ebase user can define all repeating elements. Master pages are created in the designer tree with New > Print Master Page.

A default master page may be applied to each print form. This will then be used for every page of the form unless it has been overridden on that page.

The master page will specifically enable the configuration or addition of:

Page size & orientation

If a master page is set on a page, the page will adopt the page size and orientation of the master page with no option to override these dimensions in the page itself. If the Ebase user requires a different page size and orientation for a given page, s/he should either select a master page with the desired dimensions or select no master page at which point they will be allowed to specify page size and orientation on the page itself.

Once a page layout is selected, the canvas changes size to represent the new layout. Zoom buttons allow the Ebase user to enlarge or reduce the view with the aspect ratio remaining fixed.

Common drawing elements

These may be used to define headers, footers, sidebars and watermarks as well as anything else that can be drawn on the canvas and is required to be repeated on every page. The master page is always rendered before any other page elements so page elements will always appear on top of master page elements.

In the print page view, the master page is displayed in the background slightly greyed out so that page elements can be clearly distinguished. When the page is printed however, the master page is drawn at full intensity as it appears on the master page canvas. If a faded effect is desired on the actual PDF, for example, to add a watermark, if text is used, it should be configured to have some transparency in its font colour which will make it appear less intense. Images used as watermarks can have a rectangle positioned over them which is filled in white with a high level of transparency and no border. This will have a similar effect of greying out the image.

Style Library

A library style is a named style which encompasses the complete set of possible style attributes, i.e. all attributes for all drawing element types. Style libraries are defined on Master pages so that when an Ebase user associates a master page with a print form or print page, all library styles become accessible for use on that page.

A master page may have a default library style set on it. This will be the set of style attributes which will be used when drawing elements are initially placed on a print page which uses that master page. Drawing elements may subsequently be edited and other library styles applied to them.

After a library style has been applied to an element, the element's individual style attributes may be changed independently which will have the effect of overriding the attributes from the library style. The library style is not "linked" so updating it will not automatically update all elements which have at one point had that style applied. If the Ebase user wants to re-apply the library style, they can do so using the 'edit style' dialog box. This will re-apply the latest version of the names library style.

Text Maintenance

At design time, the texts displayed in the print form are in the designer's default language (as is currently the case for the Ebase Designer). The texts maintenance dialog box presents all texts found on all the print form for adding translations texts. Since these texts do not have names to identify them, they are just presented with their instance id numbers but should be clearly distinguishable by their original text.

Testing the Print Form

The Ebase Designer provides a 'run' button for print forms which allows the Ebase user to test the print form by generating it as a PDF with dummy values in place of any runtime values. It is also recommended to test the form in the runtime context by launching it from a running form using a print button to ensure that all print regions are sized appropriately to accept typical runtime data and any dynamic lists.