OSCAR’s Rich Text Letter generator has a long story…

First it was created by Dr. Peter Hutten-Czapski. There were several versions. Then since 2020 there came RTL 2020 which only worked with OSCAR19 since there was lots of new functionality which relied on back-end files that are only in OSCAR19. At this point it was very hard for OSCAR users that aren’t on OSCAR19 (i.e. they are with another OSCAR fork/vendor or they can’t upgrade) to find a letter generator eForm that could simply work on their system without heavily modifying code. There have still been many OSCAR users who want a simple letter generator tool that works with their system without the need for changing code.

So then I (Adrian Starzynski) came across a RTL version by Avaros from a colleague recommendation, which had a very nice user interface (modern and simple), and was only one HTML file instead of dozens of image/javascript/reference files like in other RTL versions. I immediately liked the concept so I changed a few things here and there to make it simpler and so that it will work with all OSCAR systems.

Some information about this RTL version:

• It won’t work if you don’t have internet access (it references external CSS and icon files)
  • This is because it’s only one HTML file instead of a package of several files (instead of referencing the local icons/CSS, it’s pulling them from remote CDN)
• The signature works in this way – you need to have a specific signature image file uploaded to your OSCAR’s eForm images folder, and when you click the “SIGNATURE STAMP” button on the left it will populate that signature image file (the format is ‘consult_sig_1.png’ where 1 is to be replaced by your OSCAR Provider ID #). For simplicity and to save space on-screen, the manual “wet signature pad” has been removed, so you should use the SIGNATURE STAMP button for when you want your signature to populate.. For simplicity and to save space on-screen, the manual “wet signature pad” has been removed, so you should use the SIGNATURE STAMP button for when you want your signature to populate.
• This is designed to work with all OSCAR versions, so it doesn’t have the specific functions from the OSCAR19-specific RTLs (i.e. no lab grid, no specialist search box, no built-in template file editor…)

To install, simply import the ZIP.

I hope you enjoy the simplicity of this Letter Generator and thanks Avaros for the “facelift” that I forked.

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If you import the ZIP and the eForm is not working, go to your eForm images and search for “blank.rtl”. If nothing comes up then you have to upload the blank.rtl file to your eForm images because this is the default template file that the RTL loads and if it doesn’t exist then it won’t work. This is the default template and can be modified per these instructions.

This means that you cannot just import the newest RTL into your system; the RTL eForm now relies on editControl2.js.jsp which like all other JSPs is not something that a user can add themselves from the front-end, and is compiled with Tomcat.

However if you are looking for a simple Rich Text Letter generator that works with (almost) all versions of OSCAR, please use this one.

As of November 15th, 2020, the latest version of the Rich Text Letter is 2.0. If you have previously been using the RTL, you need to either replace the code in that eForm with that found in RTL2.0.txt, or you can create a whole new eForm and rename the (RTL2.0.txt) text file to something that ends in .html . You will also need the new editControl2.txt file which needs to be renamed to editControl2.js and saved in the images folder in OSCAR. There is now support for entering page breaks as well.

Version 2.0 is a newer version of the Rich Text Letter than present in your OSCAR, or OSCAR inspired software.

Not all features here will work on versions of OSCAR other than OSCAR19 (i.e. lab grid, specialist search box, template editor etc. will only work in OSCAR19).

To install just install the zip.

Additional files may need to be uploaded depending on your system

OPTIONAL: Stamps.js, edit to list your signing providers and their corresponding signature stamp image, and upload to the images folder to allow for automatic selection of the appropriate signature stamp.

OPTIONAL: several examples of RTL templates that can be uploaded to your images folder

NOTE that for some OSCAR forks (eg JUNO) this zip will not work.  Instead of the zip JUNO you will need to upload a new version of editControl.js to your images and cut and paste the content of the  rtl20_custom_editControl.txt file into the eform editor

If you have never had a Rich Text Letter you may need to upload all the images used for controlling the RTL  individually from images.zip

Created by Peter Hutten-Czapski, complete with word processing abilities and links to multiple areas of the chart. Please see the description here.

The Rich Text Letter writer is copyright by Peter Hutten-Czapski 2007-2020 © under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1

Thanks to Stanley Hurwitz for the lab grid function.