Printed forms
The invoice, the cheque and the purchase order as they leave the building — and changing the layout without a support ticket.
Every ERP prints an invoice, and every one of them gets the same complaint: the layout is wrong for this company, and changing it is a support ticket. In TRANXACT the layout is a record, edited in a drag-and-drop designer, and the change every company makes is made once by that company.
The designer
- Drag fields, text, lines, boxes, images and the line-item table onto the page and position them.
- Positions are in millimetres, not pixels, because the output is paper. A logo 20mm from the top is 20mm from the top on every printer.
- A form has three kinds of page — first, continuation and last — so a covering page, a repeated header and a totals block that only appears at the end are a layout, not a special case in code.
- Preview renders the real PDF with real data before you commit to it.
Printing one
A document’s print action offers the templates defined for its type. Your default printer comes from your own preferences, and the printer list is ordinary configuration an administrator maintains — adding one is a configuration entry, not a release.
What this does not do
Fonts are not embedded in the generated PDF. The shipped templates are therefore Latin-script; a form laid out in Arabic, Devanagari, Kannada or Tamil will not render its text correctly. The console is translated into seventeen languages, and the printed forms are not — that is a real limit, stated here rather than discovered at the printer.
Eight templates ship as a starting point — invoice, credit memo, purchase order, cheque, remittance, statement, delivery note and receipt. Copy one rather than starting from a blank page, and your copy survives the next release: shipped templates are replaced on upgrade, and yours are not.