Overview
The Document Composition Editor lives inside Composition Studio and is where you design the content of your communications: letters, statements, contracts, notices, and anything else you need to send. It's the part of the platform you'll spend the most time in when you're creating or refining a template.
If you've used Microsoft Word, you'll feel at home straight away. The editor handles everything you'd expect from an enterprise-grade composition toolset, like fonts, paragraphs, tables, images, reusable content blocks, headers and footers. It also has features built specifically for building and deploying advanced, compliance-focused, personalised communications.
This guide is a tour, not a manual. It walks through what the editor can do so you know where to look when you need something specific.
Format your text
All the standard word-processor formatting is here:
- Font face, size, and colour
- Bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough
- Bulleted and numbered lists
- Text alignment (left, right, centre, justify)
- Line spacing and paragraph spacing
- Indentation and tab stops
- Superscript, subscript, and highlight colour
For consistency across a long document, or a whole library of templates, lean on styles rather than formatting each paragraph by hand. Define a heading style, a body style, and any others you need, then apply them as you go. Change a style definition later and every paragraph using it updates at once.
A few productivity tools worth knowing about:
- Find and replace for swapping terms across the whole document in one go.
- Spell check that flags issues as you type, so you can fix them on the spot.
- Format painter for copying formatting from one bit of text and applying it elsewhere.
Layout the page
Page layout is where you set the bones of the document: the parts that stay put as content flows in.
- Page size and orientation — A4, Letter, or a custom size, in portrait or landscape.
- Margins — set them globally or override them for specific sections.
- Page breaks — force a new page exactly where you want one.
- Columns — split text into two or more columns for newsletters or compact layouts.
For longer or more structured documents, sections give you a way to mix and match layouts within a single document. Each section can have its own margins, page orientation, headers, footers, and page numbering rules, so you can do things like:
- Run a portrait cover page in front of landscape pages for a wide table
- Switch headers and footers part way through, handy for cover pages or appendices
- Apply page numbering only to the main body and skip it for the cover and appendix
Customise headers and footers
Headers and footers are where the repeating bits of your document live: page numbers, dates, your logo, contact details, or merge fields like the recipient's name. The editor gives you fine-grained control over how they behave across the document.
- Section-based — different headers and footers for different parts of the document.
- First page different — suppress or replace the header and footer on the first page, useful for letterhead or cover pages.
- Odd and even pages — alternate headers and footers for double-sided printing, so things sit on the outside edge of each page.
- Page numbers — insert anywhere in the header or footer, with formats like "Page 4 of 6" that update on their own.
Add tables, images, and other elements
Beyond text, the editor handles all the building blocks you'll need for richer documents:
- Tables — full control over rows, columns, borders, shading, cell merging, and alignment. Header rows can repeat across page breaks, and column widths can stretch to fit the page.
- Images — drop in logos, illustrations, or photos. Position them inline, anchor them to a paragraph, or float them behind text.
- Shapes and drawings — a fully featured drawings editor for arrows, callouts, signature blocks, and grouped shape objects. Shapes are MS Word compatible, so they round-trip cleanly to and from .docx.
- Hyperlinks and bookmarks — link to internal sections or external URLs for digital outputs.
- Charts — pie, bar, and line charts that pull from data inserted into the document.
- Barcodes — generate 1D and 2D barcodes including QR Code and PDF417, with over 20 types supported. Barcodes can bind to data sources so each document gets its own unique code, and auto-scale mode keeps them readable when content shifts around them.
Build, save, and deploy reusable content blocks
Reusable content blocks are chunks of content you save once and drop into any template that needs them. Think disclaimers, terms-and-conditions blurbs, branded footers, payment instructions, or standard sign-offs, anything that shows up across more than one communication and needs to stay consistent.
Working with blocks usually follows the same three steps:
- Build it — design the block in the editor like you would any other content. Blocks can include text, images, tables, merge fields, and conditional content, so they can be as simple or as rich as you need.
- Save it to the library — give the block a clear name and a category so it's easy to find later. The library is shared across templates, so anything you save is available to the rest of your team straight away.
- Drop it into your templates — when you're building or editing a template, insert a saved block wherever you need it. The block keeps its formatting, so you don't have to rebuild it each time.
The big win with blocks is consistency. When legal updates a disclaimer or compliance reworks a privacy notice, you make the change once in the library and every template using it picks up the update. No hunting through templates to make the same edit twice.
Personalise with merge fields
Merge fields are what turn a static template into a personalised communication. Drop one in and the editor swaps it for the right value when the document is generated, so a single template can produce thousands of unique documents.
There are a few personalisation patterns worth knowing about:
- Merge fields insert any data point from your Application's fields, like recipient name, account number, statement period, or balance.
- Conditional content shows or hides a block of text based on a rule. Use it for paragraphs that only apply to some recipients, like a payment reminder that appears only when the balance is above zero.
- Repeating regions are how you handle data lists: invoice line items, transaction tables, or any content where the number of rows changes for each recipient.
- Nested repeating regions let you handle data that has structure, like a customer with multiple accounts, each with their own transactions. The editor supports master-detail and side-by-side layouts so the document matches the shape of your data.
Once placed, merge fields show up as labelled placeholders, so it's easy to see at a glance where personalisation is happening.
Review and collaborate
Before a template goes live, the editor gives you a few ways to check it over with the team:
- Track changes records edits so you can review them with a colleague before accepting or rejecting each one.
- Comments are great for leaving notes during review without changing the document itself.
- Print preview shows exactly how the document will render across pages, including how headers, footers, sections, and page breaks behave.
Export to the format you need
The editor supports a wide range of file formats, so you can move documents in and out without losing fidelity:
- DOCX and DOC for working with Microsoft Word, either as a source for existing content or a way to share drafts with people outside the platform.
- RTF for older systems that still rely on Rich Text Format.
- HTML for web and email outputs.
- PDF for final output that looks the same wherever it lands.
- PDF/A for documents that need to meet long-term archival requirements.
You can also bring different document types together into one unified output, which is handy when a single send is made up of a covering letter, a statement, and a terms-and-conditions appendix that all started life as separate files.
Quick tip
If you're new to the editor, start with a copy of an existing template rather than a blank page. You'll inherit the styles, margins, and merge field setup that's already proven to work, which is a much faster way in than starting from scratch.