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I need to create letter template for one company which will keep a format styles unchanged (to keep united design across all letters which are sent from the company) but allow users to add specific content (text, tabs, images etc.) into it. Do you know best way how to do that? I tried Word forms but it doesn't work well.

I needed to lock formatting to prohibit changes of fonts, size, colours etc. However users usually need to copy and paste text from another documents. In Word forms they pasted text with original format but because of my prohibition they couldn't then change it.

Do you know any other solution? What about adobe forms? Is it used also for letters? Or do you know any other software for it?

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  • 1
    Make a web page that has text fields that works just like this site? But yes actually there is no good solution to your problem.
    – joojaa
    May 22, 2018 at 9:53
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    You can't create a locked file and expect users to then be able to edit the contents within that file.
    – Scott
    May 22, 2018 at 9:56

2 Answers 2

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InCopy allows collaborators to make direct but limited edits to an InDesign file without affecting the general layout, this assuming the collaborators have time and are willing to learn using a new tool.

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There is one software, but it needs to be installed on a specific hardware... CAPACITATION on the users.

If the company makes the letters using Word, they need to use Word. Provide capacitation on how to do it properly.

If you want to install InCopy and Indesign... guess what... you need capacitation.

If you made a fully customized web-based system on a server using CCS to PDF libraries... you need capacitation.

If you want to implement a fully new automated AI system... well there you probably do not need much capacitation... But that is not the case.


Some options:

  1. This website works on a bb tagged system. You can use asterics* or hashtags# to make text bold, or transform it into headers, and that is it. You can not change color or fonts. So you can prepare a customized web-based system.

  2. Use InCopy, but I really doubt is a good solution to implement it at a big scale if the people in charge are not designers.

  3. Limit the users actually making the letters to a bunch of well-capacitated ones.

  4. Make a template in Word but also include a customized toolbar with a big fat button that pastes text as text only. And another big fat button that drops the format and resets it to the default one.

PRESS ME

You were tempted to press it, didn't you?

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