Preface
Oscar provides a simple letter writer to provide neat and professional communications that can be populated automatically and get saved in a reusable format to the patients chart. A tutorial on the original rich text letter writer has been compiled by Dr Klein. While these instructions apply in part to any of the Rich Text Letter that have come in OSCAR since OSCAR V10.6, the instructions have been brought up to date to reflect all the features in version 20 of the Rich Text Letter (RTL)
The Rich Text Letter writer is copyright by Peter Hutten-Czapski 2007-2020 © under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1
This document is copyright by Peter Hutten-Czapski 2010-2020 © under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
Prerequisites
Most versions of OSCAR and its variants have a version of the Rich Text Letter installed since OSCAR v 10.6. In some installations the RTL may be incorporated as an archived eForm (aka deleted) from where they can be activated by un-archiving (admin > eforms > List of deleted eforms > restore)
Launching Rich Text Letter
You can launch the RTL any way that you launch eForms
- By typing “Rich” in the encounter’s everything box and selecting “Rich Text Letter”
- Click on the ‘+’ on the eForm Encounter interface
- Click on the ‘eForm’ link on the Master Demographic
- From the schedule screen if you have the RTL configured to have a link in your preferences
The Text Area
You can start using the RTL editor that you opened up above directly by typing into the (usually blank) text area. On a basic level that is all you need to do.
Toolbars
The toolbar also has many of the typical word processing functions. The following buttons are available and are present as a default in the following sequence. Which buttons are present and in which order is easily configured
First group
- bold toggle of the selected text (strong) eg BOLD
- italic text toggle (emphasis) eg Italic
- underlined text toggle Underlined
- strike through text toggle Strike through
- subscript text toggle Subscript
- superscript text toggle Superscript
- left justify text toggle
- center justify text
- fully justify text
- right justify text
- bulleted list
- ordered list ie numbered
- horizontal rule
- a button that undoes the last action(s)
- redo the last action(s)
- indent the text
- outdent the text
- selects all text
- remove font formatting from all selected text
Second group
- insert a heading
- insert a table
- apply text colour (eg blue)
- highlight selection (eg yellow)
- insert an image (TIP use ${oscar_image_path} for local images)
- insert a link
- attach a file (needs OSCAR 19)
- insert a page break
- add the current time
- add the current date
- cut selected text
- copy selected text
- delete selected text
- help button
- template editor
- export
The selectors
- Format selector for headings/paragraphs
- Font selector for common web font faces
- Font sizing selector. The largest size is 7 which is about 36pt or 48px
- Template selector. Here you select a template that fills with values from the OSCAR database based on the selected patient and current user.
Quick Text

Default blocks of text taken from the patients chart can be inserted with the Quick Text buttons. Clicking a button will insert that particular block of text at the point selected in the writing pane.
Templates
Templates allow form letters to be quickly loaded with the patient’s data for easy customization in conjunction with quick text and the toolbar functions. The consult template is demonstrated in the writing pane of the above Quick Text illustration. The back to work template is demonstrated below.
- First select the template
- The template with its placeholders gets loaded
- The letter writer prompts you for user defined placeholders
Not shown is that when you supply the information requested all the exhibited placeholders get converted into their respective values.
Predefined templates include
- consult
- off work note
- narcotic contract
- missed appointment
- custom template
All templates are accessible in Admin > Upload an Image >
New templates can be created with the template editor button, and then saved/exported in rtf format. You then upload to your Oscar server to the images folder.
The custom template is located in Admin > Upload an Image > custom.rtl and gives you examples.
Using Measurements in Placeholders
The normal placeholders are delimited by ##’s (eg. ##current_user_cpsid##). The list of standard placeholder names can be found on the eForm Magic page.
What about Measurements? Unfortunately, you can’t just use the standard oscarDB measurement tag (oscarDB=m$HT#value ) as a placeholder name.
In order to bring a measurement into the Rich Text Letter eform, you have to load them into temporary variables BEFORE your template is loaded.
You do this by adding a hidden field for each measurement in the RTL eForm code. This line:
<input type=”hidden” name=”EPW” id=”EPW” oscarDB=m$EPW#value>
is added to the ‘DoNotPrint’ section in the top of the <body> section. It creates a hidden field called EPW with the latest Epworth score. You need to define all the measurements this way.
Once that is done, your RTL template placeholder name would be ##EPW##.
Finishing it off
The ^ Expand Toggle
Clicking on the Expand icon collapses the bottom icons and shows more of the page. Re-clicking it will toggle the bottom buttons / more condensed view
HTML view
Finishing off the letter is the bottom bar that provides some additional controls.
- The HTML view allows you to view (and edit GULP!) the raw output of Letter
- If you can’t get your output to look perfect this is where you can tweak
- the Use CSS check box alters how the program encodes the page.
- The Subject is what the tool tip comment shows when the mouse is hovered over it a list of saved eForms
- Submit saves the letter
- Reset clears the contents of the letter
- Print invokes the print dialog
- Print & Save is a one button way to do both printing and saving
Signing
The signing box below the form will allow for you to sign by mouse or trackpad or other device and that will be transferred when saved into the insertion point in the Rich Text letter. If you are not seeing the signing box, then you need to have your OSP adjust your oscar.properties file to turn that feature on (OSCAR 12.1 and newer)
Faxing
Faxing is done from a picklist of providers. Select the provider and click add provider and that provider will be added to the fax distribution list. Alternately manually insert a fax number into the list. If you do not see Faxing then you need to have your OSP adjust your oscar.properties file to turn that feature on (OSCAR 12.1 and newer)
When finished click “submit and fax” and the signed letter will be delivered to your addressee’s