Re-using Word templates with stamps as Page Layouts?

[daicehawk]

Is there any direct way to import a Word template document with stamps (like in the picture in the attachment) and make a Page Layout (or a Master Page)to apply it then to Word output in Flare 7?

WordTemplatewithStamps.png

[wclass]

Not really.
When importing, Flare creates a master page that includes some aspects of the Word template, but I have found that they are not very useful. If you have a Footer with the page numbers or date (or file name or whatever), Flare hard codes the date or number rather than inserting a variable.
There is no option to choose to create a page layout instead of a master page.

I discard any master page created by Flare and create my own that works - this does not take much time either. As a caveat, if I want Word output formatted in a particular way, I generate with a plain Flare master page and then attach an existing Word template that has already been set up - this saves on a lot of pre- and post-processing. I figure Flare is great for managing content, but if you really want Word output just do it in Word.

[daicehawk]

Not really.
When importing, Flare creates a master page that includes some aspects of the Word template, but I have found that they are not very useful. If you have a Footer with the page numbers or date (or file name or whatever), Flare hard codes the date or number rather than inserting a variable.
There is no option to choose to create a page layout instead of a master page.

I discard any master page created by Flare and create my own that works - this does not take much time either. As a caveat, if I want Word output formatted in a particular way, I generate with a plain Flare master page and then attach an existing Word template that has already been set up - this saves on a lot of pre- and post-processing. I figure Flare is great for managing content, but if you really want Word output just do it in Word.

Thank you Margaret. I was thinking the same about creating a plain Word output and applying a template in Word, but then I am worried whether the Word output can be properly managed in any way in Word and the styles and formatting created in Flare (like series lists GH:{n}.{n+} and such) will not be destroyed after applying a word template. Another concern is that the Word template has several pages with different layouts that are to be applied to particular sections in the outputput. In Flare, you can assign a page in a page layout to a topic easily, but I do not know how to handle this in Word.

[wclass]

If you have different page layouts you should probably take the time to set them up in Flare - you will have to create page layouts as they can't be imported. This is fairly straight forward and once set up it will be easy to generate documents. Unfortunately, Flare and Word don't communicate as well as they could.

We don't have trouble applying templates in Word, but the main reason is that we already have a full set of Word templates and lots of Word experience. Your numbering systems should not be destroyed, but Flare hard codes the number series in the output which means you can't continue editing in Word and expect the numbers to be dynamic - for many that is not a problem as they don't edit. I usually generate the doc without numbers (using css/mediums) and apply the numbering to the Word styles. We have Word macros that convert "H1"s to "Heading 1"s and so on, and to assign a different page layout, like a landscape page, as necessary. This would take time to set up, but, as I said, we already had this.
Now, if I could map Flare to Word styles on output ...

[daicehawk]

Sorry, I do not get it how can you apply macros in Word converting styles when Flare does not apply any styles when rendering Word output and just hardcodes local formatting?

[wclass]

Flare will apply styles to Word output, but it uses the Flare/HTML style names like H1, H2, and p rather than the standard Word style names like Heading 1, and normal. If you have set up your Flare style to have automatic numbering, either in a heading or a numbered paragraph, when it is converted to Word it will still have the style name but the numbering scheme won't be dynamic anymore, the number will be hard-coded into each generated paragraph.

For many people this is not a problem - for our work, though, it is often sent on for use with another document and the numbers need to be removed, and the styles need to be standard to fit existing templates. Our macros convert H1 to "Heading 1" and so on.