Changing Page Margins

Prior to version 4.5, the default settings use a wide left margin in most Topics - allowing for plenty of white space and readability. Understandably, not everyone likes these margins so wide, and in some cases they may not be appropriate. The good news is they are easily changed.

There are two things that you need to adjust:

The margin of the Author-it Media object/s which control page setup.
The indent of the Heading 2 and 3 styles in the Word publishing template which Author-it uses when publishing your document (authorit.dot by default).

Page Margin

To change the page margin, you need to adjust the Media objects that control page formatting. The "Chapter" and "Section" ones are the most commonly used, but your topics may use other Media objects (this is set under the Topics Document tab if a section break is inserted). Note also, that the default margins vary across different Media objects - for example the Contents, Index, Cover sections use a 2.5cm margin, whereas the Chapter, Normal, First etc, use a 7cm margin.

Heading Indent

Formatting of headings is controlled by the styles in the authorit.dot Word template which Author-it uses when generating your document. These styles are not exported from Author-it - rather, each Style in Author-it is mapped onto a corresponding style in the Word template. You'll notice that the Heading 2 and Heading 3 styles in that template have a negative left indent (of -4.5cm). This works fine with a big left margin, but will otherwise result in your level 2 and 3 headings disappearing rather disconcertingly off the left of the page. If you adjust the margin in the Media Objects you'll also need to change the indent in the Word template - the measurement you need to use will depend on what you adjust the margin to.