Print Forms — you design what goes on paper

Quote, invoice and receipt layouts used to be buried inside the program; changing one required a developer. Now you build the form: the Print Designer gives you a blank A4 and you place objects exactly where you want them, to the millimetre, seeing at once what will come out on paper. You do not need to know HTML. There is one single system — the old “pieces” and “HTML” modes were removed and your saved forms were converted to designs.

📍 Where is it?

Settings → HNR Preferences → Company Information → Print Forms. Only the system administrator can edit them: the form is the face of the document your customer receives.

🖨️ You do NOT need a design to print

Print on the Invoice Card always works: if no form has been designed for a document type, the program prints that type's built-in ready form (company and customer header, line table, totals, amount in words) and tells you “the default ready form was used”. Your administrator uses the designer on this page only when you want your own form — then your design replaces the ready one. All 11 document types print this way: quote, order, invoice, delivery note, cash/bank/collection receipt, cheque schedule, production order, production confirmation slip, warehouse transfer slip.

1. Print Designer — building the page

The Print Designer gives you a blank A4: you place everything exactly where you want it, to the millimetre — matching a pre-printed form, moving the logo to the top right, pinning the signature box to the bottom of the page.

📍 How do I open it?

Settings → HNR Preferences → Company Information → Print Forms. The screen lists the saved forms; “Design a new form” or the Design button on a row opens the designer. A new design does not start blank: a working form suited to the document type you picked is laid out for you. Delete what you dislike, drag in what is missing.

Objects you can place: Text (fixed wording), Field (a value from the database), Image (logo/stamp), Line, Rectangle, Table (line rows) and Barcode. Grab and drag an object, resize it from a corner, nudge it millimetre by millimetre with the arrow keys. Font size, weight, alignment, colour and borders are set in the right-hand panel.

Dragging a field onto the page

The tree on the left holds every field of the document type: Company (name, address, tax office, tax number, logo), Document header (number, date, due date, note, warehouse, carrier, plate, currency, rate), Account (code, name, address, tax number, balance), Line rows (code, description, quantity, unit, price, discount, VAT, amount, lot, expiry, serial), Totals (subtotal, discount, taxable base, VAT, withholding, grand total, amount in words) and Page (page no / total pages). Drop a field on the page and the real value from that document is printed there; in the designer you see it filled with a sample document.

💡 An empty field is not printed

If a field has no value in that document (say no carrier was entered) nothing is printed — no placeholder, no dangling label. To hide a whole box, give the object a condition: “hide this if that field is empty”. The withholding line works this way: on an invoice without withholding it does not print “Withholding 0.00”, the line simply is not there.

The line table and multi-page documents

The Table object prints the line rows. You can add and remove columns and set each column’s width, alignment and format (money, number, date, percent) separately. When the rows do not fit, a continuation page opens: the header row is repeated with “(cont.)” next to it. For objects that should appear on the first page only or on the last page only (letterhead, totals block, signatures) use the object’s “page” setting.

Printing and getting a PDF

Press Save and mark the design as the default for that document type, and from then on printing an invoice or quote puts this form on paper. The document’s right-click menu also has “Download as PDF”: the server renders the form and hands you a PDF file — to attach to an e-mail or to archive. PDF generation depends on the messaging service; if that service is down the program says so and points you at browser printing instead of quietly downloading an empty file.

The same form is used in three more places: “View PDF” in the document menu (the preview that opens inside the program), “Send by e-mail” and “Send via WhatsApp”. The PDF attached to a message is the very same form you see on screen and on paper — fixing the design once fixes all four.

🔄 Importing another design (JSON)

You can export a design as JSON and carry it to another company or installation: Export JSON in the designer, “Import old template (JSON)” in the list. The same button also accepts an old HTML template you still have and turns it into objects — this is the only remaining door for the old format. The conversion is best effort, not pixel-perfect: objects are stacked top to bottom and you fix their positions. If a field cannot be mapped the program lists it and tells you, and does not drop that piece.

⚠ Who can design, who can print

Designing belongs to the system administrator only — the form is the face of the document your customer receives. Printing, on the other hand, is the right of anyone who can already see the document: a salesperson can take the PDF of their own invoice, a production lead can print a work order. Printing is not a separate permission; whoever cannot see a document cannot print it either.

Related guides: Document Entry · Settings · Document Chain.

2. Logo, stamp and stock image

In the designer, place an Image object from the tool rail. The window that opens offers three sources: the Images library (HNR's own picture store), Stock image (type a stock code and press Fetch — the card photos uploaded under Stock Card › Images appear; for product catalogues and label forms) and Address (URL) / Upload file. At the top there is also a Company logo shortcut: it inserts the first image whose name contains “logo” with a single click.

💡 Why is there no separate upload?

Your logos already live in the HNR database and are shared with the desktop side. A second image store just for forms would make it unclear which copy is current when you replace a logo. Update the image once in Images and the forms follow.

⚠ If the image list is empty

That company has no image/file database (normal in test companies). You can type the file name by hand in the box at the bottom of the window; on the live company it will be found under the same name.

3. Purchase forms and sales forms are separate

Quotes, orders, invoices and delivery notes show a Purchase / Sale selector at the top. The same document type then has two separate forms, and neither overwrites the other: the sales default and the purchase default are chosen independently.

The reason is that the wording is the mirror image: a sale says "this document is our quotation, payment to our bank accounts"; a purchase says "we hereby order these items, our delivery address is…". One template cannot carry both. The retired old client kept them as two separate forms as well.

🔤 Three handy fields

Direction name (SALE / PURCHASE) and Counterparty label (Customer / Supplier) change themselves according to the direction. If you use Counterparty label as the caption of the customer box, the same layout prints the right word in both directions.

4. The form list: default, copy, delete, import

The Settings → HNR Preferences → Company Information → Print Forms screen lists the saved forms. Each row has five buttons:

Button	What it does
Design	Opens the form in the Print Designer. Administrators only.
Preview	Opens the form with a sample document; anyone can see what will come out on paper.
Set as default	This is the form used when printing. There is exactly one default per document type (and direction); marking a new one drops the old automatically.
Copy	Makes a second copy named “(copy)” — so you can experiment without breaking the working form.
Delete	Deletes the form. If you delete the default the program warns you: that type falls back to the ready form — it still prints.

📄 “Types printed with the ready form”

The box under the list shows the document types that have no design of their own. Clicking one opens the designer with that type's ready form; the moment you save, the type prints with your form.

UID part label and case label (Data Matrix)

The designer gained a new object type: Data Matrix (ECC 200). Its value either comes from a field or is built from the MIL-STD-130 UII mapping: the enterprise identifier (CAGE), the part number and the serial number are combined and encoded as an ISO/IEC 15434 Format 06 carrier. You define your CAGE code once; the program never invents a serial number. Detail: Defence Traceability → UII.