Oracle Apex Textarea printing with line breaks

Objective

Use Text Fields or Text Area fields for text input to build a document template generator. Oracle Apex version 4.

Problem(s)

With version 4 Apex introduced quite a few variable session handling changes, if you had a long experience with V3 - you will be stuck quite a few times. When you enter text in Rich Text editor or Text Area field and later try to print it in HTML area - either all HTML tags are exposed or removed. In the end you get plain text with different level of garbage. In V3 you could solve this by copying text to a simple Display Only item and use it hidden, then all the HTML tags could be prevented. Here are the three Text Areas used. Text with simple line breaks () or paragraph breaks (+) - which are invisible in UI of Text Area. 

Solution


In HTML area add <pre> and </pre> tags for the Text Area fields. Same tag applies if you change your item to read-only on display. Print preview looks great.