Document Generation - show multi-choice checkboxes on PDF

Question

I have a responsive form from which I am generating a PDF from a template. That’s working fine but because the PDF that is generated is both internal and customer facing, I’d like to be able to display a multi-choice checkbox lookup field as those checkboxes (along with the options selected) instead of returning the submitted information in a string. Is this possible? Or if I’m overthinking and there’s a better way to do this, I’m all ears. I did find the same question here but the images aren’t available & I’m struggling to wrap my head around it.

As a part 2 to this question, I’m finding that anytime I make a change to the template, I’m having to retag every single field and not just the one that changed. Is this expected behavior?

Chris_Ben · Answer

Hi,To answer your second question first, no - you should not need to retag every field each time you make a change - only retag what you’ve changed in the form e.g. if you added a new field. Even if you changed an existing field, you should not need to re-tag it.For your first question, I’d recommend using MS Word merge fields to do this as you can get them to insert cool symbols such as a tick box (or empty box if the option wasn’t picked). You’ll want to create a formula for each option using an IF statement and if the option is selected then you’ll use a tick box and if it’s not selected you’ll use an empty box. The Wingdings 2 font has those options and I’ve included their character codes in the attached word document (82 and 163 respectively).Here’s where it gets trickier - MS Word has no easy way of searching for text in a formula. e.g. you can’t issue a statement along the lines of “If the multi-select check box contains ‘orange’ then use a tickbox otherwise use a blank box”. Therefore the easiest way to get around this is to set individual variables for each option - much easier explained by an example below.Here’s my sample form with a multi-select checkbox:Then I’ve gone and created 4 form variables (one per choice):Now in your Word document, go to Quick parts and insert a field and choose IF from the drop down list:Paste this formula as a placeholder and hit OK:IF "formVariable"="true" Y NYour word document should be showing the letter N. Right mouse click on that letter and pick “toggle field codes” or you can use the keyboard shortcut ALT-F9. Now we can have some fun.You can replace the text formVariable with the appropriate choice variable from the document tagger and you can replace the Y and N with the wingdings symbols (go to Insert | Symbol to do this). Here’s what mine looks like fully populated:and here’s what it looks like after a doc gen run:I’ve attached the word template to this post and you can also import the workflow using this key:RkrY865HKeL4XCbAwqZKsrozc3u1LHPEvmXogBfuopxJ2VMBGI hope that helps!Cheers,Chris