RE: word templates vs. layout/design

[Sanjay Srikonda <SSrikonda -at- invlink -dot- com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Cayenne Woods [mailto:cwoods -at- purplevoice -dot- com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 7:51 AM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: word templates vs. layout/design


Hello all, perspective requested

We are trying to create document templates, and a couple things have come up
that don't seem right to me. I'd appreciate feedback, reality checks,
related
experience, etc

1 - Sales wants to create templates that require all our docs that go out to
look _exactly_ the same - and I mean _exactly_! I thought _I_ was anal, but
this
seems over the top to me. There's a big difference between sales/marketing
docs
and help docs, for one, but also my preference is that it should be like
templates and styles for Web sites, more or less - meaning define fairly
loosely, but don't try and control people's browsers, if they really want to
change the font, let 'em, etc. That way things don't fall apart as easily,
and
still look good if they do.

Is this something that you feel strongly enough about?  Yes, the look and
feel and functionality of the document is your lookout.  However, is this
something that you're going to be overruled on any way?  Does the person
mean the corporate look and feel or that both types of docs MUST LOOK
EXACTLY ALIKE?  If it's the latter, you're right, that is loopy.

2 - This person also wants to change the leading and kerning in body text as
part of the template. To me, this seems something you'd do for display text,
in
a proper dtp program, but not in Word. It'll fall apart as soon as someone
copies and pastes from another doc, for one, and Word is so buggy and
unreliable
it seems like the loose definitions work best. Also it just seems over the
top.

Leading/Kerning?  You're going to allow users to have these docs in Word
format?  Does this mean that outside customers will be editing your
company's documents?  Is that a good thing?  Wouldn't it make more sense to
deliver these via PDF?  All the leading/kerning would be preserved at that
point.

Apart from using two sizes of body text and terribly mismatched headlines,
and
making a heading style into a bulleted list, the suggestions might work in
spite
of themselves. However, my experience so far with this indicates that best
bet
is to define 4 header levels (necessary for toc creation in both Word and
PDFs),
a couple body texts, a couple bullet types, and stop there. What's the
consensus?

The consensus sounds to me like whatever your company decides.  This sounds
like something you're going to have to compromise upon.

thanx for any feedback 
Cayenne
<snip>

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