EICR (Electrical Installation Condition Report): editable PDF based on IET Model form 2019-01-01

[WallaceP]

Eh up

Sorry to hear some of you are having issues.

(the rest of this post is very Mac-centric, and most won't be of relevance to Windows users, unless you enjoy a good computer-based rant)

I'm Mac-based myself, and the one thing I will say is I've given up trying to make these forms compatible with Apple's default PDF viewer, "Preview" (which is otherwise great). I don't know why they don't work with it - in the old days (when the OS was "El Capitan" and earlier) they worked well, but when I got a new Mac with... what are we on now, "Mojave"?... various bits don't work any more. The drop-downs are flakey at best, non-functional at worst... and I swear the last time I looked (a few months ago), the text boxes could fit more than one number in them, but yep, you're right, now they don't, making the forms pretty much unusable. Huh

Here's what I do:

I use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to fill out all my EICs, EICRs and MEIWCs. The PDF forms, when displayed on Acrobat, look as they do when designed in OpenOffice. Funnily enough, when I designed the forms, I wanted to be able to fit "60898" in the "BS-EN" box, and "2x2.5" in the conductor details, and ">2000" in the IR boxes, so I made sure they did! Quite what Preview is doing to mess it all up, I don't know.

Another issue I've found is that, even if you fill out the form in Acrobat, and "sign" it (so it's no longer editable), and save it... at this point, it should be a fixed PDF... if you then load it into Preview, quite a lot of the fields are blank. The only way I've found that enables me to (a) get the forms to work as intended, and (b) generate a copy that's guaranteed to look as intented when I send to my clients, is:

- fill out the form using Adobe Acrobat, save it before signing it, close the document (in Acrobat)
- duplicate the file (in Finder)
- load the duplicate in Acrobat, sign it and save it
- use an app called "PDF Printer" which fools Acrobat into thinking you're "printing" the PDF to a printer, but it's actually just a program that generates a proper static PDF
- PDF Printer generates the static PDF, and displays it in Preview, and at this point it looks spot on
- I use Preview to rotate the test results page (so it's in landscape), then save it as "whatever-signed.pdf"
- That's the file I send to the client

I hate that it doesn't "just work," and I particularly hate that the only way I can get it to work is by downloading the bloated, proprietary Adobe Acrobat reader, the authors of which are so contemptuous of their users that they deliberately disable Apple's buit-in "print to PDF" feature (unless you purchase the full version, of course). I'm using free, open source software to generate the forms (OpenOffice) and I don't know which of the gazillion options to change to make it work just as intended on everything. I don't have access to a Windows computer, or an iPad/iPhone, so I can't see what the forms look like on probably 70% of the devices that people use, I'm afraid. I'm sure if I paid for the full version of Adobe PDF whatever it's called, I'd be able to generate beautiful forms that looked perfect on everything. Ain't gonna happen, though, I'm afraid.

(I hope it's clear from the above that I'm frustrated at things, not people. I tried to make something useful. I'm sorry it's not that simple.)

Cheers all

This is brilliant. I am out today but when I get home I will do that. Thank you so much for your help.

 

[Dan]

Eh up

Sorry to hear some of you are having issues.

(the rest of this post is very Mac-centric, and most won't be of relevance to Windows users, unless you enjoy a good computer-based rant)

I'm Mac-based myself, and the one thing I will say is I've given up trying to make these forms compatible with Apple's default PDF viewer, "Preview" (which is otherwise great). I don't know why they don't work with it - in the old days (when the OS was "El Capitan" and earlier) they worked well, but when I got a new Mac with... what are we on now, "Mojave"?... various bits don't work any more. The drop-downs are flakey at best, non-functional at worst... and I swear the last time I looked (a few months ago), the text boxes could fit more than one number in them, but yep, you're right, now they don't, making the forms pretty much unusable. Huh

Here's what I do:

I use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to fill out all my EICs, EICRs and MEIWCs. The PDF forms, when displayed on Acrobat, look as they do when designed in OpenOffice. Funnily enough, when I designed the forms, I wanted to be able to fit "60898" in the "BS-EN" box, and "2x2.5" in the conductor details, and ">2000" in the IR boxes, so I made sure they did! Quite what Preview is doing to mess it all up, I don't know.

Another issue I've found is that, even if you fill out the form in Acrobat, and "sign" it (so it's no longer editable), and save it... at this point, it should be a fixed PDF... if you then load it into Preview, quite a lot of the fields are blank. The only way I've found that enables me to (a) get the forms to work as intended, and (b) generate a copy that's guaranteed to look as intented when I send to my clients, is:

- fill out the form using Adobe Acrobat, save it before signing it, close the document (in Acrobat)
- duplicate the file (in Finder)
- load the duplicate in Acrobat, sign it and save it
- use an app called "PDF Printer" which fools Acrobat into thinking you're "printing" the PDF to a printer, but it's actually just a program that generates a proper static PDF
- PDF Printer generates the static PDF, and displays it in Preview, and at this point it looks spot on
- I use Preview to rotate the test results page (so it's in landscape), then save it as "whatever-signed.pdf"
- That's the file I send to the client

I hate that it doesn't "just work," and I particularly hate that the only way I can get it to work is by downloading the bloated, proprietary Adobe Acrobat reader, the authors of which are so contemptuous of their users that they deliberately disable Apple's buit-in "print to PDF" feature (unless you purchase the full version, of course). I'm using free, open source software to generate the forms (OpenOffice) and I don't know which of the gazillion options to change to make it work just as intended on everything. I don't have access to a Windows computer, or an iPad/iPhone, so I can't see what the forms look like on probably 70% of the devices that people use, I'm afraid. I'm sure if I paid for the full version of Adobe PDF whatever it's called, I'd be able to generate beautiful forms that looked perfect on everything. Ain't gonna happen, though, I'm afraid.

(I hope it's clear from the above that I'm frustrated at things, not people. I tried to make something useful. I'm sorry it's not that simple.)

Cheers all

Any chance I can have the raw file and I'll edit it in Adobe XC. I've bought it specially for this.

You've done an awesome job. Me trying to replicate it from scratch is a week's work. Don't know how you managed find the time AND then work!

Orrrr download Adobe XC free 7 day trial and open it up in that, then export it as a few versions. Upload each to a reply post. And let me download them see which one works for Windows. And then we have have a Downloadable windows one too under your account.

 

[happysteve]

Any chance I can have the raw file and I'll edit it in Adobe XC. I've bought it specially for this.

You've done an awesome job. Me trying to replicate it from scratch is a week's work. Don't know how you managed find the time AND then work!

Orrrr download Adobe XC free 7 day trial and open it up in that, then export it as a few versions. Upload each to a reply post. And let me download them see which one works for Windows. And then we have have a Downloadable windows one too under your account.

I've been tinkering and pondering for much of the day about what the best way of assisting you to do this is. I don't think giving you the OpenOffice files will help much, as they get mangled in Word, and if you try to export them (from OpenOffice) as a static PDF they don't look right, and if you remove the fields (within OpenOffice) it mangles the formatting. In any of these situations you end up doing a lot of messing about.

What I've done, which I think should help, is I've just loaded the fillable forms into Acrobat Reader, and saved them as static (not fillable) PDFs. I've attached these below (but you could do this anyway with the posh, non-free version of Adobe Acrobat).

I think you (or anyone) can use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (not sure what "XC" is?) to automatically convert these static PDFs to fillable PDFs: How to make a fillable PDF | Adobe Acrobat DC - https://acrobat.adobe.com/uk/en/acrobat/how-to/create-fillable-pdf-forms-creator.html

What would be cool (if the Adobe software can do it), is the ability to make the font smaller as the user fills in a box, so if they want to enter a really long circuit description or BS number, they can.

 

[lightning strike]

happysteve submitted a new resource:

EICR (Electrical Installation Condition Report): editable PDF based on IET Model form - Looks just like the IET model form... but you can edit, save and print it in any PDF viewer.



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Steve welldone very good of you to share these forms. Thanks!!