I hope this is in the right forum.
I want to use the MLA & Chicago templates but I cannot seem to find where to provide the values for the placeholders (e.g. <$template_fullName>). Where are these. If they aren’t ready, when will they be. They aren’t really useful as they are. I am using 35 (downloaded today)
Thank you.
Templates are being updated; some of them have been (partially) for the 035 beta, including the Chicago template. The placeholder tags that are still there in the MLA template are from the Mac version; you can just replace them in the editor with the proper filler–your name, address, etc. Word count variables will be automatically replaced on compile, so you don’t need to fiddle with those (I don’t think the essay templates count words, though, so this shouldn’t be a problem here). The Chicago version now just has other placeholder text–“Your name”, “Instructor’s name”, etc.–so it’s hopefully a bit less confusing than the variables.
I am still a bit confused. Does this mean that there are no variables?
I like the idea of a template being a time saver rather than a form.
There are some variables–word count, page count, auto-numbering–but there aren’t yet template variables like your name or address. On the Mac, this information can be extracted from an OS Address Book, so a lot of Mac programs just access that information to customize the settings. For Windows, Lee’s going to need to write his own code to let users enter this information for the program and then pull from there to populate the templates. It’s something we’d definitely like to do, but it’s not in the program yet. So for now, yes, you’ll need to just “fill out the form” for the title page of projects that would use that kind of information. The project templates as a whole deal more with structuring the binder, setting up meta-data, and preparing compile settings for a specific output. They’re flexible, of course, so you can change all of this; a lot of people just check them out once to get ideas for how they might want to work but don’t regularly use the templates at all.
What you can do to make this more a time-saver and “automated” template is to create a project from the template you want to use and personalize it–enter your information in the title page and adjust any meta-data or interface settings you want for starting out. Then use File>Save As Template to create a custom version of the template that you can use for future projects: your info will already be filled out, ready to go.
Thank you.