InfoPath Dev

Hi,

I noticed that when you try to print an Infopath form, half the page is usually out of the print area so there's no way you can have the form in its full width on a single sheet.

To avoid that, I wrote a CSS stylesheet that I tried to include in view1.xsl :

(view1.xsl)
<head>
   ...
   <style themeStyle="urn:office.microsoft.com:themeBlue">BODY {
	COLOR: black; BACKGROUND-COLOR: white
   }
   TABLE {
	BORDER-RIGHT: medium none; BORDER-TOP: medium none;       BORDER-LEFT: medium none; BORDER-BOTTOM: medium none; BORDER-COLLAPSE:    collapse
   }
   ...
   </style>
   <link rel="stylesheet" type"text/css" href="print.css"/>
</head>

print.css is in the same directory as view1.xsl.
The problem is, when I try to open the Infopath form in design mode, I get an error : "Infopath failed to open this form : ...\...\myform.xsf.
A name contained an invalid character".

Whatever I place in that CSS stylesheet (even nothing) I get the error, but when I remove the link to the external stylesheet the error disappears.

Does anyone know how to solve that ?
Any help appreciated.

To print the InfoPath form correctly, limit the size of the section to be around 6.5 inches. This will print the width in a single page. What is the size of your table or the section in which your controls are present? You can reduce that width to get everything to be printed in a single page.

The size is 731 px because many users are still in 800x600.
But I'd like to set a different size for display and for printing, which I can't do because of that error...

Anyone ?

Hi Glebur,

Sorry for the late response. Please check out this HowTo:http://www.infopathdev.com/howto/tutorials/default.aspx?i=a396459320204261ad2379381824683d

I think the crucial step you're missing is adding the file as a resource.

Hi Matt,

I followed exactly that howto (including adding the file as a resource), that's precisely what puzzles me.

I've just gone through the whole process over again but the error message is still there.

Could it be the css file's encoding or something ? I created it with Visual Studio 2003...

quote:

---

Originally posted by Matt Faus

Hi Glebur,

Sorry for the late response. Please check out this HowTo:http://www.infopathdev.com/howto/tutorials/default.aspx?i=a396459320204261ad2379381824683d

I think the crucial step you're missing is adding the file as a resource.

---

Hm, Ok. Sorry to insult your intelligence :)

It seems like your CSS file is not in correct syntax. Could you paste it here so we can take a look? It's interesting that you created it with VS2003, and it's using an invalid character in one of the names. Maybe you are using a reserved keyword that's only reserved in InfoPath's context?

Well you won't believe me but I deleted print.css, re-created it and it works now (whatever text it contains) !

Something must have been wrong with the file encoding or I don't know what...

Anyway, thanks for putting in your intelligence to help ;)

Well I'm facing a new problem. Here's the contents of the stylesheet :

table {  FONT-FAMILY: Wingdings !important; }
span {  FONT-FAMILY: Wingdings !important; }
col {  FONT-FAMILY: Wingdings !important; }

When the reference to this external stylesheet is <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="print.css"/>, everything works fine (you can tell it straight away because of the weird Wingdings characters that appear).

However when I try to limit the stylesheet to printing ( <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print.css"/> ), the styles don't apply !

Is this because the internal styles have priority over external ones when you print ?

I solved that by creating an internal @media print style.
This is not very convenient though since I have to rewrite the style in each view's xsl file...