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Making It Look Good

There are numerous features for "dressing up" your output. The two basic methods for accomplishing most formatting tasks are the use of styles and local formatting.

Styles and style sheets A style is a formatting designation that you can use to quickly change the appearance of your content (such as characters, paragraphs, or tables) in multiple places at once. They allow you to separate your content from its presentation. Styles are stored in cascading style sheet files, and can be found in the Resources\Stylesheets subfolder in the Content Explorer. See About Styles and Style Sheets.

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You might apply an <h2> style to subheadings in your topics in order to separate your content into easy-to-read segments. The <h2> style contains all kinds of information (e.g., font type, font size, spacing above and below) that determines how the style appears in the output. Rather than setting the look of one of these headings at each place where it occurs in the project, you can set the look on the style used for the headings; therefore, the look is automatically applied to every heading that uses that style.
Local formatting This is a way to change the look and feel of content directly so that the changes are applied only to that specific content (as opposed to applying the changes throughout your project via the use of styles). Many easy-to-use tools are provided for formatting topics directly in the XML Editor, without having to know XML at all. However, it is recommended that you use styles instead of local formatting whenever possible. See Local Formatting.

Following are some of the primary ways that you can make your project look good, through the use of styles or local formatting:

Auto-numbers Just as the name implies, auto-numbers are numbers that are associated with content automatically. For example, you might want to create a PDF manual that is divided into volume and chapter numbers. Auto-numbering lets you keep this numbering consistent throughout, without having to apply the numbers manually. There is also a great deal of flexibility in determining what information auto-numbers include and how they look. See About Auto-Numbers.
Fonts Flare lets you change various font properties to affect the way that your text looks. See About Fonts.
Headings When you are creating headings in print-based output, you have a lot of options as to how you can configure them, including the ability to position them (e.g., create side headings). You can simply use the <h1> through <h6> style tags provided in Flare, and you can modify the style settings to meet your needs. See Heading Examples.

Lists You can create simple and multi-level lists (both numbered and bulleted) for content. These are useful for step-by-step procedures. See About Lists.
Object positioning You can precisely specify the placement of objects, such as images and text boxes. For example, you can float objects to the left or right of a frame in a page. You might do this, for example, if you want text to wrap around an image, or if you want to create a case study (using a text box) and make it display to the left of the flow of normal text in a chapter. See About Object Positioning.
Paragraph formatting There are many ways that you can affect the look of paragraphs that you create. This includes initial caps, drop caps, hyphenation, page column breaks, short line elimination, spacing, widows, orphans, and more. You can also float paragraph content (e.g., position headings to the left of page layout frames). See About Paragraph Formatting.
Skins A skin is a pre-designed look and feel for your online output. In a skin, you control the appearance, size, tabs or buttons, and styles associated with the output window that you generate. Think of it as a suit or a dress in your closet. You can alter your entire look just by changing your clothes. A skin is simply a change of clothes for your output. After you edit the settings for a skin, you associate the skin with a target that you want to build. If you have additional targets that you want to build, you can add more skins to your project, editing their settings, and associating them with the appropriate targets. See About Skins.

WHAT'S NEXT?

After you make the different parts of your project look good, you can then move on to the other basic steps:

Note: You do not necessarily need to follow all of the above steps (and their substeps) in the exact order given. For example, as you add topics to a project, you may want to start applying styles and formatting to them right away, before adding other "stuff" to the project, such as a glossary. However, the above sequence probably makes the most overall logical sense. For example, you must start a project before adding "stuff" (topics, content, cross-references, etc.) to it. And of course, you cannot distribute output to your end users until you build the final output.