Adobe Interactive Forms: page breaks, long texts and formatting

[paolo_romano2]

I was tricked when first trying to manage long texts in my adobe interactive forms and saw that a scroll-down bar appeared on my document to display all the text!!! that wasn't my intention!!! I would like to read all the text on several page and be able to print it!

 Soon I found the solution in the adobe forum Re: Display more lines of table than size of current page posted by Gopi Krishna...this work and finally I obtained the result I was looking for...but I need also to format it....using javascript in my forms also that has been easy.

 But let's see the solution step-by-step:

1 - Declare a Subform of TABLE with the following characteristics:

binding=normal

ExpandToFit='X'

AllowPageBreak='X'

OverflowLeader e OverFlowTrailer

2 - Inside that subform, declare another subform of TABLEROW with the following settings:

binding=normal

expandToFit='X'

AllowPageBreak='X'

RepeatSubFormForEachDataItem='X'

OverFlowLeader e Trailer

Both the subform MUST have 'FLOW CONTENT' settled.

 Then put below the Subform 2 the field of your data node which contain the text to be displayed. Warning: you should carefully format your texts to have each row fit exactly one line in your adobe form!

For instance, if in your form fits 65 chars, you should make each line of your table exactly 65 chars! This to avoid the unpleasant 'scroll-down' effect on your adobe form.

Now you should see the effect, the long text will be printed in some pages...but of course there is no possibility to format it, because it is effectively only one field.

We can use a workaround: some formatting chars in the begin of the line/word and a few lines of JAVASCRIPT code in the docReady event of the Table Subform(the first one) on server side of your InteractiveForm :

----- dettaglio.subformReferto::docReady - (JavaScript, server) ------------------------------------  var oNodes = xfa.resolveNodes("subform1.subform2[*]"); var nNodesLength = oNodes.length; var sFillColor; for (var nNodeCount = 0;       nNodeCount<nNodesLength;        nNodeCount++) { var sVal=new String(oNodes.item(nNodeCount).line.rawValue); if (sVal.indexOf("/b")==0)  { oNodes.item(nNodeCount).line.font.weight = "bold"; oNodes.item(nNodeCount).line.rawValue    = sVal.substr(2,sVal.length-1); } if (oNodes.item(nNodeCount).line.rawValue=="TITOLO"){ oNodes.item(nNodeCount).referto.font.weight = "bold"; } }

In the example above, the LINE text is formatted in BOLD if in the begin of line there is the '/b' code or if the line content is 'TITOLO'.

Of course, you can use the methods of the TextField element to manage all of your text formattings!