Common Confusions
In HotDocs there are a some features which, while working as expected, may at first seem counter intuitive. The following is a list of common confusions and known issues:
See the Troubleshooting section of this help file to resolve other issues you encounter.
Document Assembly
Problems with Text Pushing Too Far to the Left Side of the Assembled Document
Templates developed in Word 2007 with smart tags enabled can display text incorrectly. This results from a bug in Microsoft's Open XML Format SDK. If you have templates automated from documents developed in Word 2007, be sure to remove the smart tags in your templates or ask your template developer to resolve this problem.
Enabling Update table of contents, references, fields etc in HotDocs Server templates
On the HotDocs Server tab of Component File Properties, if you enable Update table of contents, references, fields, etc option, you may find that it does not produce exactly the same results as the desktop option of the same name on the Assembly tab. Unlike in desktop HotDocs, using this feature with server is known to occasionally alter or lose advanced formatting features in the assembled document. Not enabling this feature removes the chance of this error occurring but you loose the ability to dynamically update the table of contents, references, fields etc in the interview. If you choose to use this feature when converting a template for use with HotDocs server, we recommend testing all features that previously relied on the desktop version of this option.
Using the /nw Command-line Switch with the /of Switch Does Not Support Converting a Document to PDF
Normally, the file extension on the file specified in the /of command line switch instructs HotDocs to convert the assembled document to a file of that type after assembly. However, when converting to PDF, this only works when the assembly window is visible. When you hide the assembly window (by using the /nw switch), conversion to a PDF document is not supported. HotDocs does, however, save the assembled document to a file with a .PDF extension as instructed by the /of command line switch. This can be confusing if you specify “tf=template.docx /of=document.pdf” in the command line after using a /nw switch. In this case, HotDocs assembles a DOCX document from the DOCX template, but saves the DOCX document iin the file system with the filename specified by the /of switch (document.pdf). If you then double-click that file in Windows Explorer, the application mapped to the PDF file extension (usually Adobe Reader) tries to open the file but fails because the file contains a DOCX document, not a PDF document (as the file extension claims).
In cases where the assembly window is hidden by specifying the /nw switch, only native word processor file types are supported for the /of commandline switch, as follows:
| Template type | Allowed output file |
| DOCX | DOCX |
| RTF | RTF, DOCX |
| DOT | RTF, DOCX |
Work Around
A possible work around is to use Microsoft Word's PDF conversion feature to accomplish the same result, using either Word's graphical user or programming interface.
Known Issues
The following issues are known and are either not addressable by HotDocs as they originate in external software or are planned to be resolved the future releases. In the meantime you can use the workarounds listed below:
Browser Interviews
- In a Javascript interview, selecting "None of the above" on a list style multiple choice question in the interview, occasionally does not clear any other selected options. You need to hold down Ctrl and click the selected options to clear them and then you can select "None of the above" only.