Title: Communications Setup in Campus Solutions - Working with headers in Comm Gen
Author: Matt Hansen, University of Missouri - System
Blog Series Overview:
The Featured Topics Education Blog Series is sponsored and hosted by the HEUG Campus Community Advisory Group, with the intention to assist and educate the user community about featured topics of interest to the community. To view other articles in the series, please go to the Article Index for the Featured Topics Blog Series.
Article Overview:
This article illustrates the use of tables in template headers to avoid images, objects and text from overlapping.
Article:
Is the use of headers in your Communication Generation templates causing headaches and extra formatting work? Let the information in this blog ease your pain.
Somewhere within Rich Text Formatted documents and BI Publisher, there are limitations to processing information within the Header section of a template document. Don’t ask me why but I can tell you “how” to handle this and move on to bigger and more important things.
The Issue:
When using headers in BI Publisher templates funny things happen in Comm Gen. See Figure 1 where this screen shot shows the template with a nicely formatted set of information in the Header section, however you’ll notice in Figure 2 that when the process runs the output looks very different. The header information is completely jumbled up, the image is overlaid on the address, etc.
Figure 1
Figure 2
The Solution:
After some frustrating hours years ago, I determined that taking this information out of the Header section and putting it in a table resolved the formatting issues. Therefore my solution was to reduce the Header section to something small, I chose 0.1” size. Then insert a table with the appropriate columns and rows for the information to be presented and format the cells accordingly (see Figure 3). Once the letter header information tests out in the pseudo-header section, then you can remove the table borders (see Figure 4). The final output looks much better (see Figure 5) and this allows you to intentionally control the information within your new template header area.
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5 - Finished look
