Report Generation (Printing)

WhisperReporter Ascent offers several options for printing your report, the most common are printing to a PDF and printing to a hard copy. Access the print dialog two ways:

1.Go to File > Print/Generate Report.

2.Click the Printer icon in the upper-left corner of the screen.

This will invoke the Generate Report dialog:

GenerateReport

Chapters / Topics to Include

This section allows you to specify which chapters or topics not to print by unchecking them either at the chapter level or topic level. To uncheck at the topic level, click on the gray pointer next to a chapter to expand it.

Topic Suppression Options

•The first two check boxes allow you to automatically suppress (not print) any topics in the report that are empty. Empty topics are blank and have no content. You also have the option to treat topics you did not edit as empty, suppressing them as well.

•The other section for suppressing topics applies to topic checkboxes which you might or might not use in your report template (refer to Topic Checkbox Group Manager for more information on topic checkbox usage). If you use them, you can suppress topics that have one or more checkboxes selected (either "any" or "all"), such as a checkbox you might have labeled "Suppress".

While these suppression options work well, it may take a couple of “Print Previews” to know what combination of these suppression options you need to use. If all else fails, leave these boxes unchecked and suppress using the Chapters/Topics to include panel.

Generate Report To

These options let you decide in what format to print your report.

•Adobe Acrobat PDF File - This creates a PDF file and is the most common output format.

•Rich Text Format (RTF) File - Can be opened by word processors such as Microsoft Word; however, there may be some issues with formatting plus some RTF editors might not support embedded images (and none support embedded video).

•HTML File for viewing as a web page - This will produce an HTML file, but be sure your Layouts all conform to a style that converts the native editor format into the resulting HTML that is satisfactory to you (headers and footers will be ignored when printing to HTML format).

•Printer - Prints a hard copy of the report to the selected printer.

Watermark Override

WhisperReporter Ascent allows you to add, or override, a watermark for your report. Selecting one here will override any you may have added for one or more chapters using the ReportView Manager (you can only override watermarks using a traditional watermark, not one that will be overlaid). Click the gear button to the right of the watermark dropdown icon which opens the Watermark Manager to add a new image to the watermark database or to preview one that you may want to use. Once you have selected the image you then have the option to either center, tile or stretch the image on the page. Traditional watermarks are images that will be printed onto the page before any other page printing is performed, basically placing the watermark into the background.

Options

Options to tailor the generation in various ways

•Generate report as a worksheet - Print the report as is, however, no topic checkboxes will be selected, and any client data is not included. You can also optionally "show cloaked items as uncloaked" so that they will appear in the worksheet.

•Suppress Watermarks - Suppresses any chapter watermarks that were marked as suppressible in the ReportView Manager.

•Suppress Unassigned Image Alias Placeholders - Suppress an image alias placeholder if it does not have an image assigned to it.

•Bring Live Preview to foreground on a refresh - Whenever changes are saved, the Print Preview windows is updated. Select this option if you want the Print Preview window to come to the forefront.

•Show Line Break Attributes in Preview - Select this option to be able to see where the line breaks are in the report. This can be useful when previewing and adjusting page breaks and spacing between topics / chapters.

Preview

Before generating a final copy of the report, you have the option to see your report in a preview dialog. Use this to check headers and footers, pagination, and the appropriate suppression of topics. The print preview button may also display the “Audit Alert” report. This Report Audit tells you if and where there are items which violate selected audit items such as unselected picklists and text placeholders that have not been deleted or changed. It is important to clear these alerts because text placeholders will print as “XXXX” on the generated report and picklists will print with their descriptive name.

Create

Once you are satisfied with your report and have selected the format you want; you can generate final copies using the [Create…] button. Again you may get the Report Audit alert for a final check.