Creating Mid Topic Jumps

Many people ask if Author-it provides a bookmark functionality with the ability to link to a specific location within a topic or if there are plans to do so.

Simply put, Author-it does provide this functionality now - it just may not be as straightforward as people expect...

With Author-it you can only link to a topic, not to parts of a topic. Provided your topics are kept small, this works really well. Rather than linking to a subheading, you link to a subtopic. The way that Author-it is designed, it's best to keep topics small to maximize reusability.

Best practice: Never use headings inside a topic.

Author-it assigns the topic heading automatically based on the level the topic appears within the contents of the Book - a topic at the top level uses Heading 1, the next level Heading 2, the third level Heading 3, and so on.
Applying a heading style within a topic means the hierarchy in your published output could be wrong (and if topics are reused at a different level, they will be wrong), and your TOC out of synch as the TOC entries are based on heading styles. If you feel the urge or need to apply a heading to topic text - don't. Create a subtopic instead. By adjusting your folder and/or release state security, you can even restrict your authors so they can't apply headings to topic text. If they don't have list permissions to a particular style, they can't apply that style to text...

And remember that multiple topics can appear on the same HTML page.

Under the HTML properties of each topic there is a Start New Page checkbox. If this box is cleared, the topic is included in the same .htm page as the previous topic. The topics then appear within the one HTML page, but as they are different topics, you can link between them. Author-it inserts an anchor tag (<a name>) automatically where the sub topic starts, and references this anchor name when linking to it.

An alternative approach is to create small HTML files outside Author-it with named anchors - just simple html files containing <a name=anchorname> - and add these to Author-it as File Objects using the Linked HTML Code File Template. Add the File Object to your Topic in Author-it, and link to it using an external link that references the anchor: <a href=page.htm#anchorname>