Templates

A template is a document with blanks in it: a letter, an agreement, a meeting note you write again and again with a few details changed. Fill in the blanks and Plicine makes a new document with the words written in.

The template is never changed and never used up, so make as many documents from it as you like. Each one is an ordinary document from then on. Nothing ties it to the template, and changing the template later doesn't touch documents already made from it.

Making a template

Any document can be a template. Wherever a detail changes, write a name for it between double curly brackets:

# Welcome, {{name}}

Your first day is {{start-date}}. Ask for {{buddy}} at the front desk.

A name is made of letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, with no spaces. That's all it takes. As soon as a document has a blank in it, it gets a Template badge in the sidebar and a Use template button at the top of the window, so it stands apart from the documents made from it.

Use the same name twice and it's one blank, filled in once and written in both places.

Filling one in

Open the template and click Use template (it's in the three-dots menu when the window is narrow). A form opens with one field for each blank. Fill them in.

Save as starts out next to the template, named after it without the word "template"; change it to wherever the new document should go. Create document writes the new document and opens it. It never replaces a document that's already there.

Details that are already known

Some details are the same every time: your organisation's name, a currency, the name of the person a whole folder of documents is for. Those can be set once, for a vault or for a folder, and every template underneath picks them up. The form shows them already filled in and you only type what's different.

Setting them is a job for whoever looks after the vault, since they're written into a settings file. Template syntax and data explains how.

For technical readers: templates can also repeat rows of a table, show or hide a paragraph, and be filled in from a spreadsheet or a script on the command line, a hundred documents at a time. Template syntax and data covers all of it.