Preparing templates for Bracketeer

Optional text parts

Bracketeer was designed to work with the square-brackets and placeholders that are most commonly found in legal documents.

Optional text parts are represented by square brackets. For example, the text below can either be "each resigning existing Director" or "each Director":

Options can also be nested within each other, typically two or three levels deep. For example, the following bullet is completely optional, because it is surrounded by square brackets. When the end-user would choose to keep this bullet, she can choose between (a) one or multiple resignation letters; and (b) "each Director" versus "each resigning existing Director".

Options can even span across paragraphs, to indicate that entire blocks of text are optional. For example, the author of the following template designated the entire section 5.2 as optional through the opening square bracket at the very beginning of the first paragraph, and the closing square bracket at the very end:

Be careful when nesting square brackets, especially when spanning them across paragraphs. In practice, we very often see that beyond 2 or 3 levels, humans start making mistakes when keeping track of deeply embedded square brackets.

Bracketeer tries to be "forgiving" when missing a closing bracket, but nevertheless it will show you an error when it cannot make sense of a certain set of nested square brackets.

Bracketeer presents these optional parts in a user-friendly visual manner, through dotted lines.

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Alternative text parts

Alternatives can be expressed in two ways: either through neighbouring square brackets, or by using slashes within square brackets.

Slashes within square brackets:

Adjacent square brackets:

Note that no spaces are allowed between the adjacent bracket sets. Otherwise, Bracketeer — and many humans! — would interpret each as three optional text parts instead of three alternatives from which only one must be chosen.

A third option is to use slahes between the square bracket sets:

Whichever method you choose, will Bracketeer presents the alternatives in a visual manner, inviting you to select one of three:

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Placeholders

Placeholders are generic labels, which are intended to be replaced by concrete text. Placeholders can be inserted by highlighting text:

Any highlighting colour will work, although yellow is most common.

Bracketeer will always show placeholders in yellow

By simply clicking on a placeholder, end-users can replace the placeholder with an actual value. Bracketeer will remember your selections (in the screen below the dates in March & August), so you can quickly choose values by simply clicking with the mouse.

Note that a commonly found style in legal templates is to use both square brackets and highlighted text. Bracketeer will treat such situations as mere placeholders, i.e. not as options (as would be the case when only square brackets but no highlights would be used).