Following are some answers to questions you might have about creating topics.
What do you put in topics?
After you create a topic, you can add to it almost anything you want—text, tables, formatting styles, hyperlinks, pictures, multimedia, etc. It all depends on the needs of your audience. A topic can contain simple text, or it can contain a combination of many elements. A topic does not even need to contain much text at all; for example, you could simply use a topic to hold a Flash-based movie or an index proxy for print-based output. You are only limited by what you can do with XML, because each topic is an XHTML topic that is edited in Flare's XML Editor.
Note: If you are not familiar with XML, that's okay. You can use Flare's interface, working much like you would in a program such as Microsoft Word. Flare creates the XML tags behind the scenes for you.
How big should topics be?
For online output, topics are like pages on a well-designed website. They should not be too long, but should be long enough to provide useful information. There is no specific rule for determining how long to make your topics. It is mostly a matter of common sense. When you are developing a topic, ask yourself if it is something that you would find useful and easy to read.
If you have a topic that seems to be getting a little long, you can break the topic into smaller topics and provide hyperlinks from one topic to another. Another solution is to use Flare's DHTML features (drop-down text and expanding text) to collapse areas of text until end users click a hotspot to open the hidden text. You care currently reading content contained in a drop-down hotspot.
When it comes to creating print-based output from Flare, these small topics can be strung together in the output to form larger chapters. It is recommended that you try to use small topics when working in Flare—usually no more than a few pages in output. Although you can certainly create a very long topic that holds all of the content for an entire chapter or manual, smaller topics allow you to take full advantage of Flare's many powerful single-sourcing features. For example, with small topics, you can reuse them when generating many different outputs, all from the same project. You might want to use some topics in some outputs, but not in others. With large documents, that is very difficult, if not impossible to do. In addition, small topics are much easier to send out to others for review. In addition to the regular topics that make up your chapter content, you can create special topics with a proxy (placeholder) for displaying generated content. These special topics are especially useful for print-based output and are often used for your manual's front matter and back matter. The most common type of generated content is a table of contents. Other kinds of output for which you can create topics include indexes, glossaries, endnotes, lists of elements, and lists of concepts.
Where do you edit topics?
After you create or open a topic, it is displayed in its own page in the XML Editor, which is where you add content to a topic and format it.
Where are topics stored?
In the Flare interface, topic files (XHTML files with an .htm extension) are stored in the Content Explorer, either at the root level or in custom folders that you create.
In your Flare project folder (you specified the location for the folder on your computer when you created the project), the topic files are stored in a subfolder called "Content."
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