Template not showing in Document Manager

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vwnisus
Posts: 58
Joined: 2016-04-24 00:13:31

Template not showing in Document Manager

Post by vwnisus »

I have created my first template.

I created an ordinary file and set up the formats I needed (margins and added some text). I saved it then as a template and in the folder where the other templates are stored by Nisus Writer Pro.

This folder is /Users/victor/Dropbox/Nisus/Nisus Writer Settings/Templates.

The template is named: notary - basis template.dot

When I open the Document Manager the new template is not shown. See attachment.

The new template does exist and is with the other Nisus Writer Pro templates when I look at the files in Finder.
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phspaelti
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Location: Japan

Re: Template not showing in Document Manager

Post by phspaelti »

Yeah, that't the wrong way to go about it. But I totally understand. I tried the same and couldn't get it to work. I think you'll have to remove that one by hand.

Instead use the "Save in Document Manager > Templates" command directly to create the template and save it.

I must say however that I think that this method doesn't allow you to properly control where the template file ends up, and I don't know that there is a method to move template files (which can be located anywhere) to the template folder. The "Templates" group in the Document Manager is not a "folder" type..
philip
vwnisus
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Re: Template not showing in Document Manager

Post by vwnisus »

Thank you for the reply.

Using:
Instead use the "Save in Document Manager > Templates" command directly to create the template and save it.
solves the issue.

But leads to another:

1. I synchronise settings between 3 Macs (Preferences / General / Sycnchronised setings location).
2. On the 2 other Macs the template saved with Save in Document Manager > Templates on the first Mac does not show up.

Before I created the first template I reset all 3 copies of Nisus Writer Pro to default (following https://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=6506) before starting synchronising settings.

Is what I describe to be expected?
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phspaelti
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Re: Template not showing in Document Manager

Post by phspaelti »

I don't know that "expected" is the word I would use, but you have hit on the problem I was trying to describe above. It seems that Nisus only allows templates to be picked up by the Document Manager via the "Save (As)…" method, which in turn means that your synchronized macs won't/can't pick them up. The synchronized settings don't seem to transfer this info either, but of course generally one might want the Document Managers on different macs to not synchronize, since some of the files might not be present on either machine.

Still it would definitely be good if one could have synchronized templates on different macs, and I'm not sure how—or indeed whether—Nisus can do that at this point.
philip
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phspaelti
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Re: Template not showing in Document Manager

Post by phspaelti »

Actually checking some more, I now see that the Templates group in the Document Manager has an "Add Files to Group" command (using the control key). My set-up is actually that I have the "Nisus New File", "Macro Template" and the "Plain Text Template" in a folder on my Dropbox. And presumably I have connected them on my macs via this "Add Files to Group" command. So when I modify the templates, this carries through. So maybe it works to get synchronized templates after all. But as you can see I struggle to get it right myself. :drunk:
philip
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martin
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Re: Template not showing in Document Manager

Post by martin »

I'm sorry this was confusing for both of you. It would be nice if the Templates group behaved a bit more simply to automatically detect and list templates on all your Macs.

The current behavior comes down to the fact that the Templates group is a Document Manager group that shows an arbitrary list of files. It doesn't necessarily show the contents of a single folder on disk. In this way you can add templates to it from a variety of folders on disk. That's nice sometimes, but I can see how it was confusing here. A user would likely expect new files saved to the Templates folder to appear in the Templates group automatically, and on all their Macs.

The list of template files doesn't sync on all your Macs because each Document Manager maintains its own list of files on each Mac. Not every file on one Mac exists on all other Macs. And even if the file does, there's not necessarily a way for Nisus Writer to automatically obtain access to that file due to sandboxing security restrictions.

So for now you'll need to do as Philip discovered: manually add the desired template files to the Document Manager group. You can do that using the built-in commands, or just drag-drop from the Finder.
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