Use this article when you are about to send a price to a customer and need to understand which controls in setup drive the rendered PDF, and where the live estimate's totals enter the letter. After this you will know which dialog in Estimate Setup owns each part of the letter, where you trigger the PDF from, and when the letter total can legitimately differ from the on-screen quote total.
What the quote letter is
The quote letter is the customer-facing PDF your shop sends with a quote. It applies a single letter template — the company header, the body copy, the closing block, the footer, and the tax line if you publish one — to the line items, quantities, and totals of a calculated estimate, then renders one PDF per quote. The template lives in Estimate Setup; the totals come from the saved estimate at the moment you trigger the PDF.
The quote letter is not the same as the MIS export. View PDF, Download PDF Summary, and Download PDF Detail are for people who read PDFs. The MIS export is a structured handoff for systems. See How estimate export works for the export side.
A worked example
Northgate Press quotes a stitched book run on the XL105 with Silk 100gsm SRA1 for a regional publisher. The estimator finishes the quote on the estimate page, confirms the price, and selects View PDF on the totals bar to render the customer-facing letter.
The PDF that opens uses the active Email Template from Estimate Setup → Settings — the company header (company name, address, phone, email, website, logo), the customer details block, the metadata line (estimate number, date), the salutation, the introductory paragraph, the product details table, the closing text, and the footer notes — and it pulls in the calculated Total estimate from this quote. Because Northgate Press has set Tax label to GST and Tax rate (%) to 10 in General Settings, the PDF renders a GST line at 10% on top of the subtotal, and the in-app totals bar on the estimate page shows Subtotal (excl. GST) and Total estimate (incl. GST) to match.
The publisher gets one PDF that ties the shop's brand to one calculated total. If the estimator goes back and re-saves the estimate with a different quantity, View PDF has to run again to re-render the letter — the PDF the customer sees is the one the operator generated last, not the live estimate.
What this affects
The PDF rendered to the customer. Every change to the Email Template (company header, customer block alignment, salutation, intro paragraph, closing text, footer notes, footer images, header and footer modes) shows up the next time View PDF, Download PDF Summary, or Download PDF Detail is triggered on any estimate.
The in-app totals on the estimate page. When Tax rate (%) is configured, the totals bar on the calculated estimate splits into a Subtotal (excl. ...) line and a Total estimate (incl. ...) line — the Tax label value used on the PDF (for example, GST or VAT) is substituted into the parentheses on both lines.
The PDF action available to the operator. Single-product estimates show View PDF. Multi-product estimates show Download PDF Summary (one row per product) and Download PDF Detail (per-product specification rows in addition to price). All three actions read the same Email Template and General Settings, but render different layouts.
What this does not affect
The calculated price in setup. The Email Template and the General Settings tax fields are presentation layers. They do not change pricing rules, customer markups, substrate prices, machine rates, rebates, or manual price adjustments. The same estimate calculation runs whether the PDF is rendered or not.
The MIS export. The export reads the structured estimate, not the rendered PDF. A change to the Email Template never changes what flows through the export. If the export and the PDF disagree on the total, the issue is in the calculation path or in the export mapping, not in the letter template.
Other quotes for the same customer. Changing the Email Template changes the letter on every quote the shop sends next; it does not retroactively change a PDF that was already downloaded.