In most cases, the documents you produce with ITP will need to have the same look and feel. The company logo for example is always printed in the top right corner, the margins are set to certain values and the text of the document is always put in a certain font with a certain size. All these characteristics can be classified as the corporate style. Maybe you have a different kind of corporate style for different kinds of documents or maybe you always want the same corporate style applied to all documents that you produce.
The ITP/MDK Repository offers support to develop and maintain documents that support the corporate style of your documents. These kinds of documents are called Style Documents.
A Style Document contains (Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org processor) styles and other layout that are part of the corporate style. For example headers, a body-text style and the company logo in the top right corner. When a Style Document is configured for a project its styles are available in the ITP Model documents and Include documents in this project. Every time an ITP Microsoft Word Model document or Include Microsoft Word document is opened in the ITP/MDK Repository, the styles are applied to the document. The styles will not be visible for OpenOffice.org documents. When an ITP Model is created, the styles are applied as well (this also applies for OpenOffice.org documents). This guarantees consistent layout of your result documents.
As mentioned earlier, Style Documents can also contain other parts of the corporate style, for example a company logo that is positioned in the upper right corner. These parts are not automatically applied to every Model Document in a project. To make these available in a Model document, the Style Document needs to be included. This can be done with the special syntax "__INC(*STYLEDOCUMENT)". This instruction will insert the content of the configured Style Document (revision) at the location where it is called.
The Style Document folder of a newly created project with Microsoft Word documents contains Style Documents with the name Text Block Style Document and Text Block Docx Style Document. The Text Block Style Document is automatically configured to be used in the project. This document holds the styles needed to lay out the Text Blocks.
To use Microsoft Word 2007 documents(*.docx) as style documents in a project, the option "Project contains:" on the tab Project should be configured as Microsoft Word document (*.docx). Then, select the Style document 'Text Block Docx Style Document' on the tab Style document. For OpenOffice.org projects this Style Document is not available. When using Text Blocks in a document it is necessary to create a Style Document with the needed styles. It is also possible to add the styles to the document or to add an include file to the document.
Note
For OpenOffice.org the style from the Style Documents is not applied when editing a document. However, it will effect when a model is build.
Refer to the ITP Model language Help for more information on Text Blocks and their lay out.