Have you ever built an online application or assessment form? Have you ever then needed to secure a hard copy of this same form? I have repeatedly encountered this situation and have finally built a custom Gravity PDF template to answer this need.
The power of this template is that it lets you provide not only an online form to your users, but also a downloadable blank version of this same form. At the moment, a blank version of your form can only be generated via a previously submitted entry to your form. Here’s a look at the template design – both filled and ready-to-be-filled.
Layout Classes & Filters
Gravity PDF has some ready-classes that will be very useful in determining layout of your blank form. Among these are pagebreak and exclude. The Typewheel Classic template introduces a few new special classes to better control layout of your form when generating the PDF and/or blank PDF.
pdf-subsection
This class allows for defining a section field as a subsection during PDF generation.
pdf-blank-rows-4
Adding this class to a multi-column list field will display a preset number of blank rows for that list.
pdf-blank-height-1.2in
This class will set the height of a field when a blank form is generated. It is especially helpful when longer form responses are expected. The end of the class can be any acceptable CSS height unit (eg. 2.5em, 3rem, 4in)
pdf-blank-exclude
Adding this class to a form field or to elements in the header and footer of a template will remove those elements from the blank PDF that is generated.
gfpdf_blank_list_values
This filter that lets you control the values shown for multi-column list fields when a blank PDF is generated. This allows you to properly set row titles for these tabular fields.
Generating a Blank Form
Generating a blank form that matches the Gravity Form you’ve developed is as simple as grabbing the PDF url for any entry and appending /blank to that URL. Visiting this URL will strip all entry data from your form and provide you with a downloadable PDF of your form. Try it now.
The blank PDF provided doesn’t currently support multi-select, post fields, pricing fields and has not been tested for support of add-ons.
Don’t need a new template, but would like to give the code a try? This should be what you need.
Get the Template
This custom minimalist template can be installed on any number of sites. This unique ready-to-use template provides your clients a new way to fill their forms.
