Printing 'white' characters

[Jim Duncan]

Hello,

I have conditional formatting set up on some fields to make the field appear
blank by setting the color to white (same as the background). It works great
in the screen, but as soon as it prints (even print preview) the white font
is replaced by light gray and the characters show up anyway (even in print
preview).

The fields are number or date data type, and to prevent validation errors I
have set the default value to 0 for numbers and 1/1/2005 for dates. The
Rules for the field specify to set the value back to 0 (or 1/1/2005) if the
field is blank. Because this form might be printed and filled out by hand,
I've created the conditional formatting mentioned previously hoping that the
printed form would have a blank line if the field value were the default.

Anyone know why the white font is being changed to make the values appear?
Even better, does anyone know how to make it stop?

Thanks!

 

[Franck Dauché]

Hi Jim,

If the form could be printed with blank textboxes, then, really, you
shouldn't force "fake" data into these fields. You may be better off doing
the validation by code and leave your fields blank by default.

Regards,

Franck Dauché

 

[Jim Duncan]

Thanks Franck,

Since InfoPath (by default) makes date and number fields required, leaving
them blank would throw the validation errors when trying to save if the
values were actually blank. Unless, of course, you modify the schema as
outlined here:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.infopath/msg/719cbba3c11778a4

That's got it working now and allowing me to leave the values actually
blank.

-Jim