One of the lesser known features of Formstack Documents is its ability to consume data with basic HTML formatting and output that formatted data as a merge field.
When using Microsoft Word as your template format and providing HTML field data, Formstack Documents currently officially supports the following HTML formatting styles:
- Bold ( or )
- Italic ( or )
- Underline ()
- Strikethrough (
or) - Links ()
- Image (
)
- Lists (ordered & unordered/bulleted ~
Other HTML elements and formatting may work and merge correctly, but the above list are the only tags and elements currently being supported.
Note: nesting tags (e.g. words) does not work as the output will only be in bold or italic, not both.
Beta Advanced Auto HTML Processor
If you would like to utilize advanced unsupported HTML elements you can try our beta Advanced Auto HTML processor, however some HTML could cause undesirable outputs in merged documents. This could include simply ignoring the expected formatting, or even produce invalid and erroneous outputs. We do not recommend attempting to send HTML with formatting/markup outside of the supported list above without first testing it yourself.
In addition to the above list of supported HTML, the beta Advanced Auto HTML processor can also support:
- Tables
- Some CSS font styles
- Font Face
- Font Color
- Font Size
Please note: Formstack Documents also provides a field modifier called html2office. It is best to not combine the use of the html2office modifier (or field map) and the beta Advanced Auto HTML processor. The beta was implemented to solve many of the same issues that the html2office modifier was, and using the two together can cause anomalies and undesired outputs.
To utilize the beta Advanced Auto HTML processor via the Formstack Documents web interface, please reach out to Formstack support for this feature to be added to your account. Or, to control the use of the processor on individual merges via a Formstack Documents API request, you can add a URL or POST parameter of use_advanced_html set to true or false.