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Vision for the project

The Docassemble Template Builder is a tool to aid both new and experienced template authors in speeding up their work and making it more accurate, by bringing boilerplate Jinja2 snippets and Docassemble's help function directly into the Word 2013/2016/Online environment. The inspiration is the HotDocs Word plugin, but the features will not exactly overlap because the tools are very different.

The result will be an add-in, making use of the Ribbon or a Sidepane, with buttons to insert code snippets surrounding variable names.

The key early-completed functionality will include:

• Click a button to display Docassemble documentation
• Insert a variable with brackets around it
• Surround a variable with if/endif statements, both with/without paragraph marks
• Display formatted lists/dictionaries, both each on its own line, and in sentence format.
• Insert a child document
• Use pre-canned formats (using Docassemble functions) to display dates, currency etc., from a drop-down list

Future functions:

• syntax highlighting? May need to coordinate a way to automatically remove in Docassemble. Also, need to find a JS library to adapt.
• Sync a template to the Docassemble playground
• Connect to Docassemble API, pulling down function names and variable names
• Generate a PDF preview? (using Docassemble API)
• Expression builder?