I am creating a multipage Word serial letter with OpenTBS using the [letter.tag;block=tbs:page] method as described in the OpenTBS demo. This works quite fine after I rebuilt the whole template from scratch, since the original resulted in corrupted .docx-files for a not well understood reason.
In this template, only the header of the first page contains the letterhead, all following pages have other, less verbose headers and footers.
OpenTBS now repeats a page break and the content for every element of the block as expected, but (also expected, but not wanted) uses the default headers and footers for that.
Since it is a serial letter, I want the first page header on the first page of each repetition and the standard header and footer for the following pages of each repetition.
So does anyone have an idea how to achieve this? I would work with sections, but the original template used those and they broke the whole thing, when they were processed with OpenTBS.
Ho do you implement serial letters with Word and OpenTBS?
For now, I copied the stuff from the header/footer directly to the first page and disabled differing header/footer for the first page. So OpenTBS can repeat it correctly. But this only works, because only the the header differs on the first page. Not the right solution.
They are 3 types of headers and footers in Microsoft Word : Default, Even (for even numbered pages only) and First (for the first page only). Event and First types are optional.
Each section of the document may have its own set of header/footer of the 3 types, but by default a new section has his headers/footers linked with the previous sections.
So, obviously you cannot use the Even type for your template (unless by chance each letter has exactly 2 pages).
So the only way you have left for changing headers in the same Ms Word document is to use sections (as you felt it).
You will need 2 sections: one section for the first page of a letter, and one section for other pages of a letter. Use a Default typed header for each sections. In Ms Word this is to have both options Different first page and Different odd and even pages unchecked.
In order to set a section with a different set of header/footer you just have to uncheck the option Link to previous.