For the past several months, I've been working on an application project that had to exist as an entirely standalone product, which meant I couldn't use Forms and resulted in my having to build my own simplified form designer.

However, because this process is focused on generating documents for electronic signature, one thing I did differently was to include a separate "Document" editor to further distinguish between the "web form" and the resulting document output.

Having spent a lot of time in LF Forms building separate forms for the sole purpose of storing things in the desired layout/format (and fighting with all the styling that really only applies to the web form) I found it quite helpful to have that extra layer of separation.

As a result, I think Laserfiche Forms could benefit from an optional "Document" component that could be used specifically for things like Save to Repository, Email attachments etc. because that would provide a way to take the input from our forms and convert that into a nicely formatted document without the overhead associated with a web form or having to rely on more cumbersome solutions like fillable PDF/Word templates.

The overall concept is not all that different from what we can already do in Forms, it just introduces a dedicated option for a "Document" designer that isn't bound by any of things that make web forms user-friendly but may be less desirable in a PDF.

To "bridge the gap" with regard to things you might actually want displayed as a field like checkboxes and radio buttons, I included a tag group called "fieldset" which supplements the "dataset" variables and renders the actual input elements.

I also included the option to add multiple "content" objects to the document editor, which can be used for things like isolating page numbering or generating multiple PDFs from a single form.

I don't know if this is something that would be as useful to other people but having done a lot of Forms-to-PDF document projects over the years, it can be quite the hassle to get things to render the way you want and I never much liked having to include a separate form that someone could mistakenly use in a user task.

Personally, I think it would be pretty handy to be able to design our document(s) in a more specialized interface separate from the web forms used to capture the data.

Web Form Layout Editor

Rendered Web Form

Document Content

Document Content Editor

Rendered Document (PDF)