Choosing Topic Templates and Structuring Your Book Contents

You don't need to use a different template for each Topic level in your Book. The times when you're most likely to want to use a new template is when you want to use a different Media object, and/or Superheading (the "Chapter #" that appears above the Topic Heading). For example, you may want to define different levels that break the structure into both Modules and Chapters:

Let's explain a little bit about some of the Topic templates that are included by default - which template you choose depends on the topic you are creating and where your topic fits within the structure of your book. Mostly, you'll use the Chapter and Normal templates but you may also use the Section Template and/or create further templates depending on your structure.

Chapter Template:

Use this for the first topic in each chapter - the topic that contains the name of the chapter (if nothing else). The Chapter template inserts a section break in the Word output, starts a new browse sequence in the WinHelp output and uses the Chapter Section media object for the HTML output.

Normal Template:

Use this for most of the topics in your Book. Author-it automatically takes care of Heading levels in all output formats, no matter where the topic appears in your Books contents.

So your book structure would look something like this:

As you can see, you can use the Normal Topic template at various levels – the Heading used in my published output will change according to where the Topic appears in the Book structure. Topics at the first level will use Heading 1, Topics at the second level will use Heading 2, third level Heading 3, and so on.

You may also add Sections either before or after your Chapters – all depending on your requirements. These can be useful for longer documents. In this case, it's can be a good idea to create a special Template. Using a different Topic template also allows you to use different Related Topic groups.

A Section can also occur at the same level as a Chapter - take for example the Introduction topic in the Author-it User Guide, or above the Chapters (as in the Module example above). In a case like the Introduction topic, you want your page numbering in the printed output to start from one. (If you use the Chapter Template, page numbering will continue from the Title Page and Table of Contents so begin at something like "5" - depending on how many pages appear before it). When the section is inside a chapter, page numbering needs to continue from the previous section - or you'll end up with it being continuously reset to "1". It's not always appropriate to have many Page 1's! This is why you are prompted to choose a Media object when using the Section Template- you should either choose "First Section" or "Normal Section".