Templates in STEP Publisher

To reduce the time needed to build pages, ensure style consistency, and improve accuracy, STEP Publisher allows you to create templates to roughly plan the page layout before mounting. Templates can easily be created, maintained, and reused by designers using InDesign.

The STEP Publisher / STEP’n’design plugin enables creation of the following template documents:

Publication templates are also sometimes referred to as 'master pages' or 'mounting pages.' They define the document size, margins, paragraph styles, character styles, table rules, swatches, and so forth that are used throughout a publication. See the Publication Templates topic here for more information.

Product templates predefine selections of STEP database content with powerful formatting rules that will automatically style content when dragged and dropped onto the page. These templates reduce the time needed to build pages, ensure style consistency, and improve accuracy. See the Product Templates topic here for more information.

Page templates, which are only used with the Flatplanner component, are used to roughly plan the location of product, asset, and/or classification objects on Flatplanner planned pages in a gridded format.

Note: Since page templates are only used with Flatplanner, they are not covered in the STEP Publisher portion of the STEP Online Help documentation. See the Creating Page Templates (here) and Creating Page Templates in InDesign (here) topics in the Flatplanner documentation for more information.

Which templates to use depends on the STEP Publisher components that your system contains (see table below).

  STEP Publisher Flatplanner AutoPage

Product Template

X*

X

X

Page Template

 

X

 

Publication Template

X

X

X

* The use of product templates is optional when building publications strictly through drag and drop, but strongly recommended.

Note: The product templates used when working with or without Flatplanner or AutoPage are exactly the same.

Standard InDesign documents with a file extension of .indd are used to create STEP Publisher templates. To designate an InDesign document as a STEP Publisher template, navigate to STEP > Template Type, then select the desired template type from the popup menu.