Setting up Your Standards and Conventions

Before you write one word, we recommend that you first decide on the standards and conventions that will be used in your document. This step is commonly left out of the documentation process, and often results in documents that are inconsistent, and therefore hard to read, to maintain, and to feel proud of.

To automatically enjoy all the standards and conventions that you see in this manual, for all the different output media, just create your Library based on our default (Default.adl). Easy!

Author-it lets you set, enforce and maintain standards and conventions through your documentation, especially when you're working in a team:

• Author-it only allows text formatting to be applied using a Style. This means that all paragraph and character formatting must use one of your defined Style objects - no more authors making up their own formatting conventions.
• You can create object templates to define and enforce any property settings you want to apply to certain objects. For example, we created a template for a Topic object that defined all of the property settings for the start of a new chapter.
• Retain control by restricting people's security access to limit the changes they can make to your Library. For example, after we defined our Style objects, Media objects, and all object templates for this manual, we set security for all other authors so they could only use them but not change them.

Your standards in any Library only have to be set up once for each output format, then all documentation in your Library shares the same standards.