Stationery
Put your logo, colours and footer on the documents Stedia writes.
Every PDF Stedia writes is printed on something. Out of the box that something is ours. A stationery replaces it with yours: your logo, your colours, your address block, your legal footer. It applies to every offer, report and note Stedia produces, whether you asked for it in chat or a schedule wrote it at six in the morning.
A Word file gets as much of your design as Word can hold: paper, margins, colours, type, and the running header and footer with their page numbers. It does not get the blocks you place by dragging them onto the sheet: your logo, an accent bar, an address panel. Those are PDF only. If a document has to show your logo, ask for it as a PDF. The same goes for page one's bottom margin and the table style. Page one's top margin does carry over, so a Word file leaves the room at the top where the header picture would be.
Open Resources → Stationery, or type "stationery" into the command palette. Only owners and admins can create or edit one; everyone else can open a design read-only to see what a schedule will print on.
Why it is called stationery
Stationery is the pre-printed paper a company keeps in a drawer. The letterhead is already on it — logo at the top, address down the side, bank details along the bottom, and you write your letter in the space that is left. Put a fresh sheet in the printer and you get all of that for free.
That is exactly the split this feature makes. You place the printed part once. Stedia writes into the space that is left, every time, and never touches the rest.
We could have called it a template. That word is already spoken for: action presets say what a tool does, and every document already has a house style. Stationery is the narrower, older word, and it carries the one idea that matters here: the page is printed before anybody writes on it.
In German the feature is called Briefbogen, which is the same object by its ordinary name.
Start from a PDF you already have
Import from a PDF is the fastest way in. Upload an offer or a letter with your branding and Stedia reads the first page of the file, however long it is: your colours, the margins your text sits in, the logo and any header or footer pictures where they sat, and the lines around them. The studio opens on what it found.
Everything it proposes is yours to change. Stedia is reading a page, not copying it. If the first page is already a filled-in offer, there is no empty band to measure. The text frame then keeps the house margins, and page one's top and bottom grow where a header or footer picture needs the room. When pictures at the top and at the foot both do, the offer's own lines between them are not taken over: they belong to that one offer, not to your stationery. In every other case each line comes in, and you delete the ones that are not yours. On a filled-in page only a picture within 30 mm of the top or the foot counts as header or footer. A photo or a stamp further in belongs to that offer and is not taken over either.
The import knows A4 and US Letter in portrait. A landscape or larger sheet is read as one of the two, so check Paper first. Text set on its side, such as a line up the margin, is not taken over.
A scan is refused with "Upload the original PDF instead". If the PDF cannot be read for another reason, build the design by hand instead. Nothing is lost.
The studio
The sheet in the middle is the rendered page. The handles on top of it are the elements you can move. They are the same rectangle, so what you drag is lying on what will print.
- Drag to move, the corner to resize. Hold Alt for placement finer than a millimetre.
- Undo with Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on a Mac), or the arrow button in the header. A whole drag, or a run of typing in one field, steps back in one press.
- Keyboard: Tab to an element, Enter to select it, arrow keys to nudge it a millimetre at a time, Shift with an arrow for ten. Tab once more to reach the resize handle, which takes the same arrows.
- The dashed frame is where the text Stedia writes will flow. Everything outside it is yours.
- An element that overlaps the frame is flagged. That is allowed (a watermark behind the text is a real design), but the body will run across it.
The tools on the left add an element: text, image, line or shape. Each one can appear on the first page only, on every page, or from page two onwards, which is how a letterhead works.
The panel on the right edits whatever is selected. Click the sheet's empty space to edit the sheet itself: paper, margins, Page one, Tables, colours, type, and the footer.
Page one has its own top and bottom margin, for a letterhead that needs more room up there or a footer picture that only the first page carries. A grey value follows the text frame, and leaving a field that reserves no extra room clears it. Tables sets how Stedia sets a table: compact or roomy cells, and a rule under every row, under the header only, or none. The sample under the two choices shows the effect, and the sheet itself shows the real page.
With a brand set up, a new design starts in your brand colours, Use brand colours copies them into an existing one, and the body face can be set to your brand font.
Changes are saved when you press Save. A schedule that fires a minute from now uses what you saved, not what is on the canvas. Leaving with unsaved changes asks first, wherever you leave from.
The text frame is the part people get wrong
The four margins under Text frame are not a border. They are the box Stedia writes into, and everything you place is outside it. Widen the top margin and the letterhead gets more room; widen the bottom one and the footer does. If only the first page needs more, give page one its own top or bottom margin under Page one and leave these for every page.
The studio tells you roughly how many lines the frame holds, and warns when that number is small. This matters most after an import: a template whose address block sits close above a price table leaves a narrow band between them, and that band is all page one gives your text. Anything longer continues on page two, under whatever you told to appear there.
If the frame is tighter than you meant, drag its edge on the sheet or change a margin by hand. A deliberately narrow band is a real design, an intro line above a table, so the studio says what will happen and leaves the decision to you. Saving does refuse margins that leave less than 40 mm for text, across or down.
Placeholders
Text in a header, a footer or an element can carry a placeholder, filled in as each document is written:
| Placeholder | Becomes |
|---|---|
{{title}} | the document's title |
{{subtitle}} | its subtitle, when it has one |
{{author}} | the author on the document |
{{org}} | your workspace's name |
{{date}} | the date the document was written |
{{page}} | the current page number |
{{pages}} | the total number of pages |
A worked example
Say you want every offer a schedule writes to go out on your company letterhead.
- Get the design in. Resources → Stationery → Import from a PDF, and upload an offer you have sent before. Stedia reads the first page and opens the studio on what it found.
- Check what was read. Pictures keep the place they had on the page. Nudge anything that is off, or type exact millimetres into X and Y. Check the colours and the footer text.
- Check the text frame. See how many lines it holds. On an offer template it is often the band between the address block and the price table, which may be only a few lines.
- Save. The preview under your hands is the real renderer, so what you see is what will print.
- Pin it. Open the schedule, open Options, pick your design under Stationery, save.
From then on every run of that schedule prints on it. Nothing else changes: the task, the tools and the approvals are what they were.
To use it for one conversation instead, just ask for a document in chat. Stedia offers the choice when your workspace has more than one design. To use it for everything, open it in the studio and press Make default.
Which design a document uses
Stedia takes the first of these that applies:
- the design chosen in this conversation
- the assistant's own, if the thread is running one
- the schedule's, for an unattended run
- your workspace's default
- ours, when nothing else is set
Set the default with Make default in the studio. Pin one to a schedule under Options in the schedule form.
In chat, Stedia asks once when your workspace has more than one design and nothing above has settled it. The answer holds for the rest of that conversation. Ask to switch and it switches.
What a stationery cannot do
- Slides. A design describes a sheet. Decks follow your brand instead.
- Your own font, without a brand. A stationery cannot hold font files. Set up a brand with your fonts, and headings use your heading font on every stationery.
- SVG logos. Upload a PNG or a JPEG, up to 2 MB.
Tips
Write the offer for Café Nord as a PDF.Use our "Invoices" design for this document.- Make one design the default. Then every document uses it, and nobody has to ask.
- Need your logo on the page? Ask for a PDF. Word files don't carry placed elements.
- Different design for one schedule? Pin it under Options in the schedule form.
If something goes missing
A deleted design never stops a document being written: it falls back to your default design, and to ours when there is none. A logo that cannot be loaded leaves a gap, and the design stays. A scheduled run at six in the morning does not fail because something was tidied up the night before.