Printing: a new forms feature we want.

Question

Users expect to print forms. We need a way to do it. I am using 11.1.1.4 and the users tried printing
from it. It prints but it's micro-sized, not big enough. A use for forms is enter some of the data here,
enter some of the data there and then someone who needs to the data calls up the same form at
yet a 3rd location and prints it. Someone else calls up the form at a 4th location and prints it. The idea being not having to pass paper files around from building to building. This would be a really really good idea for the next version of forms!
(And btw it would be best if it worked on forms larger than one piece of paper.) This could be a larger project like how to get forms to play nicely with some pdf program or some word processing program or
some spreadsheet program. That could take care of printing plus the highly desired by the users ability
to interact with the products they love to use. (I don't but they do.)
In the future this could expand to charts and that type of thing.
(It needs to be easier to handle than webutil! )

Answer 1

yes Mr. Ferrante it i definitely s a screen shot. And that is useful but we have forms larger than a screen. Secondly even in the case of a form that does fit on a single screen, printing it from forms ends up much smaller than the screen in both directions. I imagine this relates to the logic looking at how wide the actual screen is and then scaling it down to the much smaller paper. For example right now I'm using a screen that is 21 inches wide, about 2 1/2 pieces of portrait orientation paper wide. Imagine I bring up a form that turns out to take up 7 1/2 inches in width and I want to print that to paper that is 8 1/2 inches x 11 inches. What happens is the program is possibly looking at the possible size of the screen and not the actual size of the form? So it scales it much smaller to print, I'm guessing. We are using 6u45 btw. I don't doubt that getting printing to work well is rugged but it can be done. For example browsers do it (albeit not always perfectly). Users think 'there is that stuff I need in the form in the browser, I should be able to print it like any other web page'. Since the applet has disengaged itself from the browser apparently, we can't ask the browser to do the printing, right?. (It'd be great if we could!) So the only choice is forms (or some other java code finagled in there.) It would be such a great feature, to be able to print forms without creating a duplicate of the form so to speak in reports just to do the printing.
If you could summon adobe reader, msword, excel and so forth from forms, passing a temporary file, that would probably solve the printing issue in many cases because they could print it depending on what the form looked like. Also users love to get data into their favorite applications anyway. (Speaking of this forms needs some work on copy and paste. It could definitely be better about users being able to copy data from forms and paste data to forms.)
I definitely think anything you can do to enhance forms printing would be highly appreciated. One of the good things about forms is you can create enormous forms and it all works fine. But the form content of course extends way "below" the visible screen.
The csv thing (I'd vote for tab delimited but whatever one would do it would be highly advisable to make the delimiter user-selectable) would be a great idea. We would love to be able to save data from a form as a tab delimited file (on the client). For example we have forms that do a lot of logic and user action to select certain names and addresses. Then they want to get that information into msword for mail merge to create labels and letters.