Drawing a Template
How to draw a Rising Tide template that works - what the file is, what the protocol fills in, and a starter file you can open and change.
A template is one SVG file. You draw it, you mark the few places the protocol fills in, and from then on every piece published in it renders through your design - and pays you on every collect.
This is the workshop. It assumes you can draw an SVG and nothing else.
What the file is
Everything in the file is yours except the markers. Backgrounds, rules, ornaments, textures, borders, an illustration in the corner - draw whatever you want, however you want. The protocol does not read any of it.
What it does read is a handful of elements you tag with data-slot. Those are the places the
title, the author, the edition number and the body go. There are no other reserved names, no
sidecar config file, and nothing to fill in outside the SVG itself: the file is the whole
template.
Start from the starter
The fastest way in is to open a file that already works and change it.
Download the starter template - a portrait page with all four markers in place, comments you can read, and geometry that has been checked against the readability rules on Canvas and readability.
Open it in your editor of choice. Change the colours, the type, the frame, the ornament. Move the markers where you want them. As long as the markers survive, the file still works.
What the protocol fills in
| You tag | It becomes |
|---|---|
data-slot="title" | the piece's title |
data-slot="author" | who wrote it |
data-slot="editionNumber" | which numbered copy this is - #0042 |
data-slot="content" | the body, flowed into the box you drew |
The full vocabulary, including how poem lines stack and how stickers land, is on The markers.
The three things worth reading before you start
- Your file declares its own size. You choose a slot for orientation - portrait or landscape
- and the size comes from your file, not from the slot. See Canvas and readability.
- A bigger canvas does not make the type bigger. The display scales your whole design to fit, so what matters is the size of your type relative to the canvas width, never its absolute number.
- Two of the failures are silent. They produce a rendered page that is simply wrong rather than an error you can read. Both are on What goes wrong, and they are the reason this section exists.
In this section
- The markers - every tag you can place and what each does
- Canvas and readability - orientation, size, and the column width the protocol reads as comfortable
- What goes wrong - the failures, each named with the symptom it produces