Adding PDF form fields to your ScribeWare template

Information that goes into a PDF form can be broken down into a few different categories:

  1. Company/Inspector information. For example, the company name, inspector name, license numbers, signatures etc.

  2. Client and report information. This information comes from the "Client and Property Information" chapter of the report, such as the client's name, property address, date of inspection, etc.

  3. PDF Form information. This is this information that's specific to the particular PDF form that you're configuring.

When you customize your ScribeWare template(s) to fill a PDF form, you mainly need to work with information that 3rd category. We'll go over how to auto-fill your form with the first two later.

The structure of your template can be anything you'd like. When ScribeWare applies the form filling, it will attempt to use all the fields from the entire report, not just the chapter or section the PDF is in.

We'll use Florida's Wind Mitigation form as an example:

515KB
FL Wind Mitigation-2-1-5.pdf
pdf
Florida's Wind Mitigation PDF Form. NOTE: We already have templates configured for this form; no need to build it yourself!

Most of the information in the top area (Inspection date, Owner name, etc) are already in the report or elsewhere in ScribeWare, so no need to configure additional fields for those.

A few fields that aren't elsewhere are County, Insurance Company, # of stories, etc. To capture these, you might add a "General Information" section to your template, and fields where you can enter each value:

A little further down, under 1. Building Codes, there's a series of check boxes and text fields. You could represent this in ScribeWare by having a single field for the 3 checkbox options, and additional text fields for the additional information needed:

The 3 checkbox options are actually a single field in ScribeWare, configured to "Show as Checkboxes". You can tell SW to check each box on the PDF if the corresponding value is checked in SW.

One final thing to notice: this particular form has a number of date fields, formatting as 3 text boxes in the PDF form:

You only need one place for the value for these in ScribeWare, and as long as it's entered correctly (MM/DD/YYYY) it'll be filled into the corresponding text fields.

Next, you'll need to get your PDF's Database Field Name so you can tell ScibeWare what information goes where!

PreviousConfiguring PDF form fills in ScribeWareNextUncover your PDF's Database Field names

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