Bug Report/Feature Request - Template tags in headers and footers

[Matt]

Hi,

I've just started to use Autocrat to produce some academic reports and I'm very impressed! Such a well designed and flexible product! So far the only limitation I've found is that it doesn't seem to detect template tags in the header (or the footer based on other posts) of a Google Docs template.

While doing some research I noticed this issue has come up a few times before but twice the response seems to have been along the lines of "just put it in the body of the document" so I wanted to explain why I think this would be a useful feature and maybe tie together a few disparate threads.

Headers and Footers are a feature designed to allow you to place content outside the flow of the document. While I could "put the name at the top of the second page as well" (as one person suggested), that relies on a carefully placed page break AND the merge process not adding extra content that shifts all the content down and pushes the page break onto the second page.

When merging reports, some of which have short paragraphs of text and others that have longer paragraphs, it may not even be possible to have a single template (without headers/footers) that works for multiple students.

Headers and Footers are a useful feature AND a logical place to want to put common merge information such as names, year levels and dates.

It seems like this isn't an obscure use case either. So far, these are all the people who have taken the time to post to the forum about this feature, I can only assume they represent a much larger subset of users who would appreciate this feature working well too:

• Thomas (August 2019) reported that tags in headers or footers were causing templates to break
  
• Nadine (March 2020) reported that tags worked in headers, but not footers
  
• Erik (April 2020) wanted content in the footers
  
• David (August 2020) reported a header tag was working for the first document but not for subsequent ones
• "Spalex..."  (October 2020) reported it wasn't working for headers or footer
• User2402 (October 2020) queried whether the feature had been discontinued or broken
• Myself (February 2021)

I'm not sure if this is a bug report (based on Thomas and Nadine's posts) or a feature request (as per Spalex...'s post) but either way I hope this post is helpful in tying together a few different threads and demonstrating community desire for this feature. I'd also be happy to contribute to building or testing this feature if there is any way to contribute to the codebase on GitHub, Gitlab, BitBucket or similar.

Regards,

Matt

[Dannpan]

Seconding this feature request! 

I feel like being able to add tags to headers and footers would be extremely useful. 

I tested an alternative add-on called Publigo and tags/mergefields worked in the header, if anyone was looking for a solution. 

[RAFAEL ANTONIO OLIVEIRA]

I support this idea

[Jim]

I also would like to see this feature improved to allow use of tags in headers. I found this thread when trying to figure out why it was not working.