Forms: Concepts

Forms are used to control the page layout and the text formatting in your documents. Before a document can be displayed on the screen or printed, you must assign a form to it. If you do not assign a form to your a document, the SYSTEM form is assigned to the document by default.

Application-specific forms are used in SAP applications to specify the page layout for special documents such as as invoices or checks. These forms determine the structure of the information contained in these documents, for example, the address area, item lines, and the footer.

You can format texts with forms as follows:

• In SAPscript text processing (  Tools  Word Processing  Standard Text ), you can assign a form to your document and enter text into the main window of the form. The document is displayed or printed according to the format defined in the form.

  If you are writing a letter, for example, you can select a form for a letter and enter the text of the letter in the main window. When you print the letter, the standard text elements in the other windows (header, footer, and so on) are printed with the text of the letter.

• A document can be generated by a print program in one of the SAP applications. The print program uses a form to generate the document. Most documents are generated in the SAP system by print programs.

  A print program selects the text elements to be printed in the windows of a form. It may also collect information from the user or ask the user to enter text directly, as in some correspondence functions. The print program may also provide values for variables defined in the form.

  Finally, the print program uses the form to format the document for display or printing.

The following sections provide more information and examples to help you manage forms and styles.