When planning the design of your new form, you have the option of either extracting information from existing print lines (with the Repaginator available to simplify your data) or writing a program to deliver records mode output.

Print Line mode caters for existing applications and requires minimal change. Here are some questions you should consider to determine whether or not you can produce an output from an existing print program. Please do a Repagination of the data, and see if you can answer these questions:

• Can you easily segregate the first and subsequent page headers for a document using a "change" in the document ID or page number - for page number, can you easily determine Page 1 (from Page 10, 11 and so on)?
• Can you recognize the document footer (totals)?
• Can you identify and remove "end of page", "continued" and "brought forward" lines?
• Are you able to eliminate redundant lines? If so, then just select non-blank lines to finish.
• Are there different types of detail lines? Do they have distinguishing features or literals or the absence of data that can be used for tests to select the types your require?

Print Line mode excels when working with consistent documents. If your application output is generally consistent, or can be made consistent with the Repaginator, designing forms with Print Line mode is suggested.

Records mode is ideal for new applications and where your new requirements cannot be supported from the existing print lines. In this mode, the data required is written as records, with the first character of each record identifying the page element.

The different design concepts used in Print Line mode and Records mode will be explained in the Printline or Records Mode section.