Skip to main content

Style and Customize your Outputs

An important concept with structured authoring is the separation of content and layout. This is a core principle, and central for getting the most out of structured authoring. If you have previously been using an HTML-based help authoring tool, a word processing tool, or similar, it may take a little while to get used to the concept. But you will soon see the benefits.

You create your content in topics and then you can control the appearance by using:

  • Layouts

    There are different Layouts for the various types of outputs you can publish, and each Layout has settings that affect the entire publication. Some of these settings are for controlling the appearance, for example, setting the headings on PDF outputs.

  • CSS

    For HTML outputs, you can associate a CSS file with the Layout. Branding your HTML Outputs with CSS, for example headings and paragraphs. You can also set the HTML Layouts to include class names.

  • Attributes of the structural elements in your topics.

    For some content elements, you can add attribute values that affect the appearance of your content in the output. A common example is the width attribute which you can use to control the size of images and videos.