Styles Panel

The Styles panel () lets you create, manage, preview, and apply organization-wide document style presets. Styles control fonts, colors, spacing, headers, footers, tables, form fields, charts, and more.

---

​

How styles work

Styles in Autype follow a copy-on-apply model:

1. You create a style preset (or choose a template) that defines fonts, colors, spacing, headers, footers, etc.
2. When you click Apply or Use Template, the style configuration is copied into the document. The document now has its own independent copy of that style.
3. You can further customize the document’s style via Edit Document Style at the top of the panel. These changes only affect the current document.

​

Permissions and shared assets

Company styles and their images are readable across the organization so team members can consistently reuse logos, backgrounds, headers, and footers. Creating or changing a company style requires a licensed organization member; changing the organization default requires an organization owner or administrator. Applying a style never grants additional document access. The user must already have edit permission for the target document. Images used by a company style are copied into that document during application, which keeps existing documents independent from later preset changes. Autype prevents deletion of a company image while any style preset still references it. Remove or replace the image in those presets first. For users who belong to multiple organizations, the target organization must be selected explicitly when creating styles or uploading style images.

---

​

Sidebar overview

The panel has two main areas at the top:

• Document Style — click Edit Document Style to open the Style Editor and modify the current document’s styling directly. Changes apply only to this document.
• Create New Style — creates a reusable style preset that can be applied to any document.

Below that, two sub-tabs organize your styles:

​

My Styles

Lists style presets available to your organization. Each card includes a cached PDF preview, name, description, page size, and default font. Actions per style:

• Apply / Re-apply — applies the style to the current document
• Edit — opens the Style Editor to modify the preset
• Delete — permanently removes the preset

​

Templates

Autype ships 20 complete schema-version-2 system styles covering executive reports, consulting and sales proposals, legal memoranda, research papers, journal manuscripts, ESG and nonprofit reports, clinical reports, financial statements, audit and compliance reports, whitepapers, product requirements, employee handbooks, invoices, policy briefs, investment memos, brand brochures, board minutes, and operations playbooks. Each system style includes typography, element styles, page geometry, background decorations, reusable header/footer regions, tables, forms, charts, references, and PDF/DOCX-safe defaults. Choose Use Template in a document or Customize in the Workspace Library. Customizing always creates your own independent preset; the built-in source is never modified. The thumbnails are prerendered from the exact shared definitions with the production document renderer. A catalog manifest hashes both definition and image, and the image hash is used as the browser/CDN cache key. Production builds fail when a definition changes without regenerating its preview, so users never receive a stale or per-card runtime placeholder.

---

​

Style Editor

The Style Editor is a full-screen design studio. Page Design uses a large, zoomable page canvas. Click the page, header, or footer to open only the tools for that area; close the inspector to use the full canvas width. Typography, text elements, tables, fields, charts, code, and references remain focused setting areas with a rendered PDF preview. The style name is always available in the top bar, so it is not hidden inside one tab.

---

​

Page Design

Page Design is the primary workspace for physical page layout:

• switch directly between Master, First page, Odd, Even, Section first, and Blank;
• use the always-visible Page setup control to choose A3, A4, A5, Letter, or Legal format and portrait or landscape orientation;
• click the dashed content area, header, or footer directly on the page to open its contextual editor;
• drag the blue margin guides on the page or enter exact millimetre values;
• drag the two horizontal handles on a selected header or footer to change its distance from the page edge and its minimum height;
• zoom the editing canvas in or out without changing the document;
• switch to a two-page spread to review odd and even pages together;
• set page background colors, gradients, images, content columns, and classic side strips;
• create a header or footer from the visible empty area on the page, or reuse an existing region;
• empty headers, footers, and region cells remain visible as dashed click/drop targets, so adding the first element does not require finding a form field;
• choose a visual one-, two-, three-column, or two-row layout in the region inspector;
• drag text, fields, images, lines, variables, spacing, QR codes, and shapes from the persistent element palette into any header or footer column;
• drop several elements into the same column to stack or arrange them there;
• select an element directly on the page to edit, reorder, replace, or remove it in the contextual inspector;
• click an individual header or footer cell to set its horizontal left/center/right/stretch alignment and vertical top/middle/bottom/stretch alignment;
• use custom grid controls only when the visual presets are insufficient;
• undo and redo local changes while structural, physical-layout, DOCX, and PDF compatibility feedback remains visible in the bottom bar.

The same palette also places free page objects directly on the selected master or variant. Text, fields, images, lines, and shapes can be dragged onto the page, then moved, resized, rotated, duplicated, locked, reordered, or removed. The contextual object inspector exposes physical millimeter coordinates, page/content anchoring, left/right/stretch constraints, background/foreground layers, opacity, mirroring on even pages, clipping and overlap intent, image fit and focal point, per-edge shape borders, arrows, and multi-stop linear or radial fills. The Layers panel remains usable for background objects covered by the gray content guide. Existing current styles are read without rewriting their constraint representation: right-anchored and stretched frames, token color references, gradient stops, object IDs, locking, and layer order remain intact until the corresponding value is edited. On First/Odd/Even/Section/Blank variants, inherited objects are labelled as coming from Master. The first variant-specific edit creates an explicit copy of the effective object list; Edit Master instead keeps the shared design linked. Design starters such as double rails, page frames, corner marks, top/bottom bands, and watermarks insert ordinary editable page objects rather than a second template data structure. Use Output preview to switch the center workspace from the fast editing canvas to the authoritative rendered PDF, then return with Edit canvas. Before a current style is applied, Autype validates the complete merged document and renders a temporary DOCX/PDF preview with the active renderer. The new document snapshot is written only after that preflight succeeds. If rendering fails, the existing document remains unchanged and copied style assets are rolled back. The editor also blocks Apply/Save while a page object or background still contains an unfinished image selection or an unsafe physical layout. The gray dashed rectangle is the document content area. It is deliberately not a document preview: it makes margins and repeating page elements easy to edit without pretending to be the final renderer. DOCX/PDF rendering remains the authoritative output. Odd and even margin controls update the master’s mirrored inside/outside margins. Office formats cannot safely change section geometry on alternating page variants. Different page size, orientation, columns, or section margins therefore use an advanced section layout assigned to that section. For a legacy style the canvas initially shows a lossless preview and a warning. Merely opening and closing the editor does not migrate or rewrite it. Choose Convert to visual design explicitly before editing. The conversion stores the current page data while legacy import, validation, and rendering remain supported.

---

​

Typography

Set the global default font and configure heading numbering, figure captions, table captions, and code captions. Default Font — applies to all text unless overridden by element-specific styles: Heading Numbering — automatically numbers headings using a format string: Example: 1.1.a produces headings like 1. Title, 1.1 Section, 1.1.a Subsection. Figure Captions — controls how image and chart captions are rendered: A figure caption renders as: Figure 1: Your caption text. The number is auto-incremented across the document. Set the prefix to "Abb." for German documents or "Fig." for abbreviated English. Table Captions — same options as figure captions but for tables. A table caption renders as: Table 1: Your caption text (prefix defaults to Table). Code Captions — same options as figure captions but for code blocks. A code caption renders as: Listing 1: Your caption text (prefix defaults to Listing). Code blocks with a caption are automatically collected in the List of Code Listings.

---

​

Header & Footer

Existing legacy left, center, and right values are normalized into the visual canvas without changing the stored style. Click the header or footer directly on the page to inspect it. Choose Convert to visual design before making changes; the legacy fields remain supported by import, validation, and rendering. The old three-position form is no longer a separate navigation item. This avoids presenting two competing header/footer editors for the same style. Drag one or more blocks from the persistent element palette into a header or footer column: Available variables for text mode: Use the First page variant to hide, replace, or redesign the header or footer on the title page. Variants inherit the master until they are changed.

---

​

Text Elements

Configure the typography for each heading level (H1–H6) and two body text styles (Text, Text 2). Each element can override the global defaults. Per element:

---

​

Tables

Control the visual appearance of tables in your document. Borders: Header Row — background color and text color for the first row. Cell Padding — top, right, bottom, left padding in points. Spacing — space before and after the table element.

---

​

Form Fields

The Form Fields section controls document-wide defaults for text, number, date, multiline, choice, signature, and initials controls. These values are stored in defaults.styles.formField and defaults.spacing. A field can override them locally from its context toolbar.

---

​

Charts

Configure the color palette used for chart series. Define up to 5 series colors, each with a fill color and a border color. These colors are applied to bar charts, line charts, pie charts, and other chart types.

---

​

Code Blocks

---

​

Equations

---

​

References & Citations

Configure the styling for reference links, the List of Abbreviations, and the bibliography. Reference Links — style for internal cross-reference links (e.g., [](#anchor)): List of Abbreviations: Bibliography & Citations:

---

​

JSON Editor

For advanced users, the JSON Editor provides direct access to the raw configuration object. Changes are applied live as you type. The editor uses Monaco (the same engine as VS Code) with syntax highlighting, folding, and validation. This is useful for fine-tuning values that are not exposed in the visual UI or for copying configurations between documents.