Commonly Encountered Objects

These are the Author-it objects you will encounter most often:

• Library: the single-source database that stores all the components of your document set, which you can combine into documents, and publish those documents in many output formats. You'll usually have only one Library.
• Book: a particular document (or part of a document if you're using sub-books), which remembers how the other objects, like Topics and Styles, fit together.
• Topic: a small section of your document's contents, which usually contains a heading, several paragraphs of text, and perhaps tables and other objects like graphics. Each topic usually corresponds to one "page" in Windows Help, although there may be many topics in a single page in your printed or HTML output formats.
• File: a graphic or other external file which Author-it includes when you publish your document. Author-it's File object holds the settings like scale and captions, and either the name of the external file or the actual embedded graphic.
• Style: a formatting component that controls how text appears in your published document.
• Media: a formatting component that controls section-level, page-level, and window-level formatting in your published outputs.
• Table of Contents: an automatically created list of your document's contents, included when it is published.
• Glossary: a list of definitions for specialized terms that appear throughout your document.
• Index: a list of terms and synonyms from your content to help users find the topic they are looking for.