When you design FormTrap forms with FTDesign, you create objects and arrange them on a page. Objects are the building blocks of a form and may include text, barcodes, lines, boxes, ellipses and pictures. You can format these objects to suit your needs and arrange them with the tools in FTDesign.

Objects can be of two types:

• Constant objects represent a value that is the same each time the form is printed. Constant objects may be a company logo or a return address that is the same on each page of your form. Lines and rectangles are also considered constant objects.
• Variable objects obtain their values from the print stream. These are the place holders for fields in the data you want to print on the form. Variable objects also control the appearance of the data by formatting it with font styles or even displaying data as a barcode.

Objects may be direct or retrieved through Substitution files. Substitution files replace the form object with information from a file - meaning the information is easily and permanently changed without modification to the form. Substitutions may be fixed (for example, company name, address and phone number copied from files rather than built into the form) or variable (same information for different companies where the file name includes variable data).