Can I print a record or save it as a PDF?

A buying question, answered from the code rather than from the brochure · 20 September 2026

Two answers. Saving a record as a PDF: yes, one button. Printing straight from the browser: not tidily, not yet. The honest route is to save the PDF and print that.

The PDF

Open a record and press PDF, beside Edit and Delete. You get a document with the record’s title at the top and its fields underneath, in your form’s own order and with your form’s own labels — not a dump of database column names in alphabetical order. The file is named after the record, so a folder of them is readable.

Fields that are empty are left out, because a printed page full of blank labels is noise. Fields marked hidden are never printed: hidden means hidden from everyone on the screen, and a printed page travels further than a screen does. Anyone who can read the record can save it; the permission is exactly the same one.

And a whole list

Press Print on any list and you get a PDF of exactly what is on screen: your columns, filtered and sorted the way you left them. That is the members sheet, the attendance sheet, the stock count somebody carries round the shelves. It arrived on 21 September 2026, after somebody moving off Access told us it was the thing they would miss.

It is a list, not a report: no sections, no running totals, no layout to design. A grouped view prints flat, which is honest about what it does.

Two things it does not do, said plainly

• Ctrl-P is still untidy. There is no print styling on the app yet, so printing the page in your browser gives you the sidebar and the navigation along with your record. That is a real gap and it is on the list. Until then: press PDF, then print the PDF.
• The button is not in the installed desktop app. The Mac and Windows downloads run in a built-in window that has no ability to save a file at all — so rather than show you a button that silently does nothing, we do not show it there. Use the web app at bionicforms.com/app for now, from the same account, with the same data.

Both of those are things we would rather you read here than discover on a Tuesday afternoon with a customer waiting.

If you want the PDF sent automatically

That already existed and is worth knowing about separately. An automation can generate a PDF and email it — “when an order is marked shipped, email the customer a PDF of it” — written as a sentence rather than configured. That runs on our server without anybody pressing anything. The button on the record page is the other half: the one a person reaches for when somebody asks for a copy now.

Where this came from, since it is unusual to admit

A support tool we use ran a set of questions a buyer actually asks past our own help desk, and this one came back unanswerable: we could not print a record and nothing on the site said so. It was the only one of the seven where the honest answer needed a change to the product rather than a change to the writing. So the button exists now, and this page exists to say exactly how far it goes.

Being straight about where we are: Bionic Forms is pre-launch. There is no iOS or Android app; the macOS, Windows and Linux desktop builds and the web app are what exist today, the Windows build is not code-signed yet so Windows warns the first time you run it, and we have no external customers to point at. Every claim on this page was checked against the running product before it was written, including the two limits above.