Publishing Packages

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Formatting and styling your topics into a web site is done through a publishing package. Some very basic packages are installed with Tópico.

In a typical workflow, you select one of the basic package to start with, then you tweak it to fit your particular requirements. Publishing packages are only a starting point for you particular publication.

A publishing package typically includes:

  • Templates;
  • Stylesheets;
  • Scripts;
  • Other file types.

Templates and stylesheets

Templates are use to include/exclude different elements from your publication while stylesheets are used to position those elements and set their display attributes such as font name, color, background, borders, and more.

In fact, the XSLT and CSS standards are much more deeper than the above statement but this is the basic idea!

Tip

Once you've created and edited a few topics, and before you start customizing a base publishing package, you might want to try publishing the pages you've got with different package and stylesheets to familiarize yourself with the different layouts.

Once you're settled on a base package to start with, you might want to delete the templates and stylesheets files you don't need form the appropriate online sub folders.

Scripts and menus

Script are used in publishing packages to drive the drop down menu and attach events to different ekements in the published page. Some scripts can genereated through an XSLT template that's applied to the collection 's master file while other are static scripts that will attach to different elements.

Other associated file types

These could be images or other files that are required by a publising package.

Selecting a publishing package for your collection

Selecting a publishing package

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Sub topics

This package automatically builds a simple drop down menus for your publication. Adding a topic to the menu is only a matter of selecting this option for a particular page. The menu created with this package ca have an unlimited number of sub menus, which are created as nested unordered lists.

This package has a vertical menu in the left margin of the published pages.

The two column layout is a byproduct of the %product_name% User Guide. This two column template is a good starting point to add a left navigation emnu to your publication.

User of the professional edition can also export the files that make up a collection as a new publishing package.

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