The idea of a letterhead is that there is one template which is formatted with things like a company logo and contact information, and all letters published by the company should be printed with this letterhead as the background to the text of the letter.
The first thing to do is to create this letterhead document (i.e. with the company logo and contact information) as a normal document in MS Word™. It will probably be appropriate to just copy the existing company letterhead, if you have one.
Now you need to indicate where on this letterhead template the text of all the different letters that will be prepared should appear. This is done by placing the fillpoint «DocumentBody» in the appropriate place on the letterhead template.
Save this letterhead document as an XpressDox template (using the Save Template button on the XpressDox toolbar), and give it a suitable name, such as StandardCompanyLetterhead.xdtpl.
Although this is not the ultimate aim of having the letterhead as a template, this letterhead template can now be run as a template on its own, and the resulting merged document can be edited manually to insert the body of the document.
Now for the ultimate aim: if you have a number of standard letters which need to appear on the letterhead, then these are each created as XpressDox templates with the text of the letter and relevant Fillpoint s, such as «Addressee», «Address», «Greeting» (i.e. Dear …), «Salutation», in each of these standard letters.
Then, in the first line of each standard letter template, put the command «BaseTemplate(StandardCompanyLetterhead)». Then save this standard template (in the same folder as the letterhead) and run it – the text of the template, with completed Fillpoint s, will appear inside the letterhead.
The My Documents\XpressDox\Samples folder has some examples of letterheads and templates that are based on them.
See the recipe “Use the same letterhead on many different templates” for more advanced uses of the BaseTemplate command.
