How to Prevent Form Fields Displaying in PDF

Only certain form data is important to you. That's why Gravity PDF has a number of ways to filter out the unimportant fields in your generated PDF.

It's important to note that only certain PDF templates have these filtering options. All the core PDF templates will support the features discussed below, but premium, custom templates or your own DIY templates may not.

What fields are displayed in the PDF?

Gravity PDF will adhere to your form's conditional logic when generating a PDF. That means if the conditional logic determines a field (or entire section) should be hidden it won't be displayed on the PDF. Also, if a user doesn't fill in anything for a particular field, it won't be displayed either. Both of these settings can be modified – see Enable Conditional Logic and Show Empty Fields.

HTML and Page fields are also hidden by default, but they can be enabled using the Show Page Names and Show HTML Fields options.

You can also choose to show or hide the form's title using the Show Form Title option.

Hiding Specific Fields in the PDF

In this 15-minute video, Gravity PDF's lead developer takes you through hiding specific fields in Core and Universal PDF templates using the Gravity Forms custom CSS Class ‘exclude’ and the Gravity PDF Core Booster Add-on.

In certain cases, you may not want a particular form field from displaying in the PDF. To exclude a field, you can add the CSS class exclude to that field in the Gravity Forms editor. You can do this by:

1. Navigating to your form's Form Editor
2. Select the field you want excluded from the PDF
3. Open the Appearance section in the sidebar and add exclude to the Custom CSS Class field. If a class is already included ensure you add a space between it and exclude
4. Save your form

This technique works for all fields except the Hidden field (which doesn't include the Custom CSS Class field) and Product fields when included in the product table.

Get more control over fields using the Core Booster Extension

The exclude technique is a simple, quick and easy way to remove fields from your PDF, but it does have limitations. Besides not being able to exclude Hidden or Pricing fields, you cannot create multiple PDFs on a single form and control which fields are shown in each document. You also cannot change the order the fields are displayed. To overcome these limitations you can use the Customize Fields feature in the Core Booster extension.