RE: [office] "document template"

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

<text:template-name> is a field.  I assume it provides the content of any <meta:template> element is present.  So you could say, in the document, what template it was produced with.

It would be fun to have a test document for that.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: homembit@gmail.com [mailto:homembit@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Jomar Silva
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2011 09:18
To: office@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office] "document template"

Hi Dennis,

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 8:02 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton
<dennis.hamilton@acm.org> wrote:
> There are indeed office-productivity document systems where changes in a template can be applied to an existing document.  And some suites will allow changes in a document to be reflected back in a template.
>
> Of course, templates can be complete documents with lots of text in them, such as the templates for ODF specifications.  Most of my templates have text in them, instructions for authors, all manner of content.  I don't know how clever the update-from-template is in that case. There is no such functionality in any native ODF consumer that I am aware of, apart from what the Template Organizer allows in OpenOffice.org.
>
> I agree that the simple case is that the template document's peculiar function is that when a document is created with it, that document is a new document and not an editing of the template itself (unless it is opened as a template rather than used to start a new document).  There are a variety of ways that works.   Double-clicking on the template does it for Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, and LibreOffice.  A new document is populated with the template but it is an unnamed document.  If I touch it (add text, etc.), then it becomes an unsaved new document and I'll be asked if I want to save it if I attempt to close it.  If I want to save it, I have to name it, perhaps choose a location, etc.
>
> So the question remains, what is special about having a defined meta.xml element that names the template, if any, a document was created with?

I see a use case for that inside corporate environments. Usually a
company may have several templates to do pre-formated reports and
documents, but sometimes it is hard to know if users are really using
them. I've also seen some cases where a template was updated and the
user choose to use an old version of the template and did 'his own'
changes to match the new template (usually they do that using an old
document to start a new one instead of using a template).

Using LibreOffice, if you look at the first tab on Document Properties
(on a document created based on a template) you'll see the template
name there (and the meta:template element used in meta.xml).

> A bigger question is, what is so special about an OpenDocument Text document that has the Text Template Document MIME type, an OpenDocument Spreadsheet document that has the Spreadsheet Template Document MIME type, etc.  How can we have any interoperable interchange of templates if we lack any interoperable definition of what a template is good for?

I thought that template definition was commonly understand by
everyone, but if you have doubts about that, so I agree that we should
write this definition on the standard.

I'm playing with LibreOffice templates since yesterday and I didn't
found any use to <text:template>, so I would like to ask the 'old
guys' from the TC if they remind why this was inserted into the ODF
standard and what is the use case for that.

For what I've seen so far, the <meta:template> with a definition of
what a template is is sufficient to solve the present issue. We need
to further investigate the <text:template> use cases (I didn't found
anyone... shame on me, again !).

Best,

Jomar

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