Layout Template Overview

An overview of Layout template.

Standardizing a report template helps an organization agree on a Document or Presentation report style across all the teams.

Layout template or base templates contain a standardized template for a Document or Presentation report. These documents contain standard definitions for word styles, designs, header/footer sections, and so on. Using Layout documents ensures uniform report generation every time. In the Report tool, the Layout documents are the starting point for all Document and Presentation report creation.

Document Layout

A Document layout file must contain placeholders for the following components:
  • Table of contents
    Note: When exporting a Document report, a Word processing application is required to auto-update the Table of Contents.
  • Table of figures
  • Table of tables
  • Table of references
  • Style formats (available in the Styles ribbon)
There are other elements which are not mandatory, but a Document Layout file may contain:
  • Headers/footers
  • Page numbers
  • Watermark images
  • Design and borders

Presentation Layout

You can create Presentation Layout template based on the following approaches:
  1. Slide Layout - Presentation Layout templates based on Slide Layout must contain placeholders for the following elements:
    • Slide masters
    • Secondary slides with image, text, and table placeholders. These placeholders are replaced by actual report content at the time of export.
    • Style formats (available in the Styles ribbon)
  2. Slides with Existing Content- Presentation Layout template based on slides with existing content must contain sample images, text, and table data. This sample data will later be replaced while exporting a report. When this slide is used in the report, the same images, text and table are replaced with actual report content while exporting a report. In the following sample, there are 5 text boxes, 2 images and 1 table to read into Report structure and are replaced with new report content at the time of export.


    Figure 1.
  3. Slides with Generic Placeholders - Generic placeholders for image, text, and table placeholders. This allows you to open the Presentation reports in open source applications such as Google Docs and LibreOffice.
Tip: While creating a layout, follow a sequence for creating the content placeholders. You can use the Edit Master feature in the respective applications.

You may arrange the content (image, text, or table) shapes in your application by dragging text within the selection pane or using the right-click context menu. By default, a newly added item appears at the top of the list. Use the Z-Order technique for arranging the shapes in the slides.

HTML Layout

Generate HTML Layout file by modifying the default layout available in the HyperWorks installation.

To modify the layout follow the below steps:

  1. Copy the folder htmlLayout1 from ALTAIR_HOME\hwdesktop\mv\scripts\tcl\report\templates\ to a new directory.
  2. Open the Index_Layout.html file from htmlLayout1 folder.

    The following placeholders are editable in Index_Layout.html:

    1. REPORT_TITLE
    2. REPORT_TOC
    3. REPORT_CONTENT
  3. Change the logo and disclaimer statement in the Index_Layout.html file.
  4. Edit the style.css in the resource folder for modifying the properties of each placeholder.

    For instance, to modify the REPORT_TITLE, navigate to report-title class in the style.css file and edit the values for properties such as colour, font and width as illustrated below:

Note: To edit layout templates, refer Edit Layout Templates