Placeholders

A placeholder is a marker you drop into text that stands for a value Pural knows — the customer’s company, the contact’s name, your own organization details. It is what makes a template reusable: write “Dear «contact name»” once and every proposal built from it addresses the right person.

Inserting one

In a text block, start a placeholder from the editor’s insert menu and pick the value you want. It appears in the text as a single highlighted token, not as loose characters — you cannot accidentally break one by editing half of it.

How they resolve

Placeholders fill in from the customer attached to the proposal, plus the proposal itself and your organization. They are resolved every time the proposal is displayed — in the editor, on the public page, in the PDF — so attaching a different customer updates every placeholder at once. Nothing is stored as text and nothing has to be re-saved.

Where a value is missing — no customer attached yet, an empty field — the placeholder falls back to showing its own name in braces, {{customer.name}}. That is the signal that there is nothing to fill in from yet, not a broken placeholder.

Resolve placeholders in the editor toolbar switches between the two views: the real values, and the placeholder names. Use the first to read the proposal exactly as the client will, and the second to see at a glance which parts are placeholders at all.

In a template, and in a proposal

The same placeholder means something different depending on where it sits:

• In a template it is the whole point. There is no customer, so the template shows {{customer.name}} — that is the template being correct, not unfinished.
• In a proposal it should be filled. A placeholder still showing its braces in a proposal you are about to send means the value behind it is missing.

Typing a placeholder by hand does not work

Placeholders are editor objects, not text patterns. Typing something like {{customer.name}} into a paragraph produces exactly that string — Pural has no reason to treat it as special, and the client receives the braces verbatim. Always insert placeholders from the menu.

An AI assistant over MCP can insert real placeholders, because it copies the exact markup from the workspace rather than typing the token. The check is the same either way: if you see braces in a proposal with a customer attached, look at whether that is a placeholder with a missing value or a piece of text somebody typed.