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This page contains some top tips from our training team on Building WebForms.
These tips will help form builders make their finished document looks good, both for the people filling it in and when all the filled data and signatures get merged to form a signed document.
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To help you understand the reason behind some of these tips, here is a summary of how the finished WebForm document is created.
Once all signatures have been submitted on a WebForm, your backing .docx file is broken down into pages.
Then each page is further broken down into its individual XML elements (paragraphs, tables, images, etc).
After this, for each field in your WebForm design, we add a new XML element with the same position and size as you specified in your WebForm template. If a value was provided for that field, we then fill this new element in with that value.
Finally, the document pages are stitched back together into a new document, which is password protected and is stored for you to download later.
Tips for WebForms Templates
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Paragraph settings such as ‘Keep with next’ and ‘Keep lines together’ may cause variances between the onscreen form (which will not use them) and downloaded Word documents (which will).Fonts.
Line Spacing – Also within the paragraph settings window, we recommend setting your default line spacing to 0pt before and 12pt after to make sure that the field text starts at the top and there is plenty of room after.
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Fonts – The third-party software we use for WebForms does not recognise every font in Word and may replace some with its own default font. This can cause major variations in format and style between how the form is displayed when completing it on screen and how it appears in a downloaded Word document. For example, it may cause data fields to become misaligned in Word.
Note: Tahoma font appears to cause particular problems and may be found in example ESFA forms. We recommend using Calibri.
HTML links, e.g. URLs (
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website addresses), email addresses
Any such links in the word document will not be added to the WebForm as a live link (i.e. one you can click to open). You will need to remove them from the word document and add them as a URL field in the WebForm.
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