---
title: "House Style and Protocol Layouts, Learned from Your Documents | Trelice"
description: "Trelice learns your document format from one sample: fonts, headers, cover page, logo. It can learn your protocol template too, headings and numbering included."
canonical_url: "https://www.trelice.com/document-formats"
---

Document formats

# Your documents, in your format, learned from one sample

A sponsor’s documents do not just need the right content, they need to look like the sponsor’s documents. Trelice learns your house style from a single Word or PDF sample, your fonts, margins, headers, cover page and logo, and applies it to every document it produces. It can learn your protocol template too: your heading tree, your numbering, your own fields.

[Book a demo](/contact) [Read the docs](/docs)

## Two kinds of adaptation: look and structure

Trelice adapts to an organization on two independent axes. A **document format template** is the look: fonts and sizes, page setup, the running header and footer, table styling, the cover page, the logo. A **protocol layout** is the structure: which headings a protocol has, in what order and nesting, how they are numbered, which fields sit under each, and what the title page and signature pages carry. The two compose: a protocol can follow your heading tree and print in your house style, and each can also be used alone.

Both can be learned from documents you already have, which is usually the right way to start: the sample is the specification. Both are versioned, append-only and audited, so the exact settings that shaped any exported document can always be traced.

## Teach Trelice your house style from one document

On the Document Formats settings page, upload a document that shows your style well, a real protocol or consent form in Word or PDF. Trelice analyzes it in a few minutes and shows what it found: the fonts, the page setup, the header and footer text line by line, pictures that look like a logo, and notes on anything it was unsure about. Every setting carries a confidence chip, from confident down to a guess that asks to be checked, so the review effort goes where it belongs.

Values your document states are measured, not guessed. Page size and margins are read from the file itself, including the small bottom margins Word hides under the footer. Header and footer distances, the different-first-page setting and the logo’s real size and side on the page come from where things actually sit, not from how they look. The first page is read block by block, wording, alignment, size, boxes and position, and becomes the format’s cover page, printing what your cover prints and nothing more.

Live values become placeholders automatically. A footer reading Protocol ABC-123, Page 4 of 12 becomes a rule that prints each document’s own protocol number and page count; version labels, dates, study numbers and your organization’s own identifiers are recognized the same way. A proposed value that breaks a formatting rule is replaced individually, never wholesale, and a table lists each replacement with the rejected value, the rule, and what was used instead, preferring what was measured in your document over any built-in default.

## Correct it in plain words, inside guardrails

What the analysis got wrong, you fix in a chat: put the page number bottom right, headings in dark blue at 14 point, the study title in the header. Each reply lists exactly the changes applied, and the form and a live sample preview update together, so there is never a difference between what you asked, what the settings say and what the page shows.

The chat is deliberately narrow. It can only return formatting operations from a fixed list, never a rewritten specification; asked anything else, to write protocol text, to look up study data, to change its own rules, it declines in one line and changes nothing. Your document is treated as data throughout: nothing written inside it is ever followed as an instruction. Every chat turn, declined ones included, lands in the audit trail, and each organization has a daily allowance.

Corrections also teach. After a successful change, Trelice writes down a one-sentence general lesson about reading document formatting, stripped of your document’s own words, names and numbers. Lessons stay private to your organization and sharpen its future analyses; one only ever benefits other organizations after a platform administrator has reviewed and promoted it.

## Where a format applies, and how exports stay traceable

A format can be the organization’s default, a study’s default per kind of document, or a one-time pick on the export button; the narrowest setting wins. The same resolution applies to on-screen previews, so the preview and the download are the same document. It covers the documents Trelice produces across a study: the protocol and its synopsis, consent forms, visit instructions and the subject booklet, the eligibility screening form, supporting documents, redacted copies and more.

Every save creates a new numbered version, and earlier versions are never changed or deleted: two versions can be compared setting by setting, and restoring an old one creates a new version that copies it, keeping the history complete. When an export is queued, the format version is pinned into the job, and the audit entry names it, so a document produced last month traces to the exact settings that shaped it. Formats are deactivated, never deleted. The full administrator’s guide is [document format templates](/docs/document-format-templates); the writer’s side is one drop-down, covered in [choosing a document format](/docs/choosing-a-document-format).

Fonts get the same care as layout. Fonts embedded in your Word sample are extracted and reused; where a font cannot be embedded in PDF, Trelice names the metrically matching substitute it will print with, so lines and pages still break in the same places, and offers an upload for the real font files. Word exports always name your exact fonts.

## House protocol layouts: your template, not just your font

Many sponsors and CROs have a protocol template that is more than a style: their own heading tree, their own numbering scheme, their own title-page rows and signature blocks, fields with their own names. A **protocol layout** captures that. In the layout designer, an administrator starts from a built-in standard, [ICH M11](/protocol-authoring), ICH E6 or the TransCelerate template, and reshapes it: headings renamed, reordered and nested, numbering patterns chosen per level, fields placed under the headings the house template puts them under, and custom fields added from platform kinds, text, date, select, rich text, identifier, person, organization.

Identifiers deserve a special word, because every organization has its own: a testing facility number, an internal study code, a grant reference. An identifier field defined in a layout appears on the title page, can be marked unique so a value another study already uses is refused, is searchable, and can be printed by the house format’s headers through its own placeholder. The protocol’s editor and exports follow the layout; a layout can be the default for a study type, so every new pharmaceutical protocol is born in the house shape. The guide is [protocol layouts](/docs/protocol-layouts).

## Learn the layout from a document too

A house template usually exists as a document, so Trelice learns layouts the same way it learns formats. Upload the template, or a protocol written with it, and Trelice reads the heading tree from the document’s own styles and numbering, the title-page rows, and the signatories. Each found heading is matched to the sections Trelice knows, and each match is badged by how it was made: recognized directly, proposed by AI from a fixed list of known sections, or not mapped. Title-page rows that match nothing are proposed as new custom fields. You review the whole proposal and nothing is saved until you create the layout from it.

The same upload can learn the document’s look at the same time, producing the format template and the protocol layout from one file: together they are your protocol template, reproduced. When an existing protocol is then imported under a house layout, text found under a heading that matches a house heading lands in that heading’s own field, so the import fills your structure, not just the standard one.

## A layout is a view, never a second data model

The commitment behind house layouts is that they change presentation, never meaning. Underneath any layout, the protocol’s content is the same structured data, so review workflows, validation, consistency checks, amendments, translations, downstream documents and the [USDM study definition](/usdm) all work identically whatever the protocol looks like. Nothing is hidden by omission: a field that holds data but has no place in the layout still shows in the editor under its own group and prints in the export, so reshaping a template can never silently drop content.

Each protocol freezes the layout version it was created with. Publishing a new version of the house layout changes nothing retroactively; moving a draft protocol to the new version is an explicit, audited action. Layout versions, like format versions, are append-only and tenant-scoped.

## Formats learned on the way in

Format learning is also woven into document import. When a team imports an existing consent form, visit instructions document, screening form or study report, one checkbox, **Learn this document’s format**, runs the same analysis on the same file, so the document’s content and its look arrive together. When a study site imports one of its own documents, the learned format becomes that site’s default for the kind, so the site’s exports come back looking the way the site’s documents look. The format is learned even when the content import fails, so no upload is wasted.

This matters most in evaluations. The honest test of a document platform is not whether it can produce a document, it is whether it can produce your document: same content, same look, from your own file. Learning the format from the import is how Trelice passes that test on the first afternoon.

## Getting started

Both features are administrator settings pages: Document Formats and Protocol Layouts, each with its own guide, [document format templates](/docs/document-format-templates) and [protocol layouts](/docs/protocol-layouts). Writers never configure anything; they see a drop-down beside the export button and documents that come out right. The fastest start is one sample document and ten minutes of review.

**Related:** [Protocol authoring](/protocol-authoring)[Downstream documents](/downstream-documents)[Scaling clinical programs](/scaling-clinical-programs)[Pricing](/pricing)[Documentation](/docs)

## See it on *your* template.

Bring one document in your house style. We will learn the format live, export a document with it, and put the two side by side.

[Book a demo](/contact)