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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.
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.
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?
thanx for any feedback
Cayenne
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