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Hello,
My question is currently I am running into issues with the PDF Designer. Currently it is setup to have our pictures print on page two of our PDF. But if we don't have any pictures that need to be printed we still seem to get the second page being printed out and that's a waste of paper. Is there any way in GoCanvas to fix this issue?
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HI Sean,
Thanks for reaching out. This is actually a common question we hear from our subscribers. So, to preface my response, I want to first say that the PDF Designer is not a "precision" tool. There may be slight variations to what you are seeing in the PDF designer tool as compared to what you see on final output. Also, the PDF designer automatically adds page breaks as it runs out of space, you can't confine the PDF to always be one page if it does need the extra space.
That being said, what is probably causing the PDF designer to break to the next page in this situation is the fact that every column in your PDF has "padding". Padding is the extra bit of space above and below the column that shows up to give the PDF proper spacing when elements are put in the column so your PDF doesn't look cramped.
Padding is "static" meaning, even if you have only conditional fields in that column and none of them showed up, the padding for that column still shows up. The padding may only be a few pixels up top and on the bottom, but when you have many sections/columns that are conditional, and none of them show up, all of the padding from each section compounds on one another, and can lead to a bit of blank space that you see even when the fields are not there. This padding is probably what is causing the PDF to think it needs to break to a second page.
What can be done to fix this is for all of the conditional columns you have for the images, if you go to the column padding for those columns, you can set the top and bottom padding to 0.
If you do this, then if a conditional field is not met, since there is no padding for the column, then when the column disappears there is absolutely no space taken up for the padding and thus, it probably won't break to the next page anymore. Check out our help topic on How to change the formatting of text and other elements on the PDF designer topic here.
I'm having a similar issue, but it doesn't have to do with blank padding. I have a manual page break set in the PDF Designer. The pages following the page breaks are conditional in the app and don't show unless a certain selection is made, there are three of them to be exact. When I fill out the app and don't enter any info into those conditional screens none of the information is generated to the PDF, but three blank pages with only a header and a footer always show up in the PDF. How can I eliminate that?
Hi Chad,
Do you by any chance also have page breaks on any of those conditional screens? Or is it just the page before? If there are page breaks on the conditional screens, those will break even if you don't meet the conditions (that's a great feature request though).
The other reason that sometimes happens if if you're using static text for any part of the conditional screens instead of the default field labels or headers, in the case of a loop screen. That doesn't sound like what's happening in your case, but I figured I'd cover that base as well.
If neither of those things is the case, let me know here and I can pull in some additional brains.