Plain Text Templates Overview
A Plain text template is a template that contains only plain text, as opposed to the rich text styling and images available within a DOCX template.
Plain text templates may prove useful in situations where you need to provide a document in a plain text format. One example might be an electronic court filing system that requires you to supply documents in XML markup. In such a case, you might use a previously submitted XML document as the starting point for creating a plain text template.
Create and Edit Your Plain Text Template
As with a Word-based template or an Answer Intake, you create a plain text template from within the Author Workspace window. The moment you create your template, HotDocs opens the Composer portion of Author, so you can begin editing your plain text templates. Composer provides an editing environment for plain text templates and Answer Intakes, just as Word and the HotDocs Author Add-in for Word do for regular DOCX templates. The Field Editor you see in the Word editing environment also appears in Composer, enabling you to create HotDocs fields in your plain text templates.
Just as with regular DOCX template, a plain text template consists of unchanging, boilerplate text, and HotDocs fields that act as placeholders for text that varies from one final document to another.
Plain Text Template Files
Plain text templates comprise the same basic elements as a regular text template. That is, when you create a plain text template, in the background, HotDocs creates all the files needed to make your template work. You can tell their functions by their file extensions:
- .TTX with a blank icon—the template file proper; this indicates the file is plain text, without any formatting
- .TTX with a fancy icon—the JavaScript file
- .COM—the component file that stores the components you create to use in your template
- .TTX.CONFIG—contains the template properties you set in the Template Properties Dialog