Document TemplateLimitations and Advantages of Document Templates

Table Cells

A Table Cell is Limited to single page when producing a PDF. This is an issue if you have side by side embedded content that spans more than a page.

Snaking Columns

This feature of the Alpha Anywhere Report Writer allows for a newpaper or telephone directory style output of content, The Document template does not support snaking columns for PDFs.

Continuation headers and footers

This feature of the Alpha Anywhere Report Writer allows for a 'continued on next page' or 'continued from prior page' optional section to be injected. This functionality is not available generically in document templates, because it is not a generically available feature of DOCX, which this format conforms to.

Lack of a WYSIWYG Editor

This is a limitation of document templates currently, so this limitation may go away once work is complete on a client side layout editor.

Speed

The Document template logic produces a PDF faster than the report engine because it is much simpler.

DOCX Support

A document template can be used to generate either a DOCX or PDF. The old AMYUNI driver supported DOCX output, but the results were difficult to edit because they were not stored as flowed text, but rather absolutely positioned on the page (which made them very difficult to edit).

Human Readable Definition

The file format for DOCX is JSON, and thus can be edited easily by end user code, which makes it better for solutions which require more control over configuration. It would be possible for an end user to create document templates programatically from their application, something that cannot be done using reports.