Working with topics

Working With Sections

When working with %product_name%, it is suggested you organize your topics into sections, each of which should contains a tilte and some normal HTML content. This approach gets rid of the traditional heading approach, which tends to focus more on the division than the containment.

Adding and Copying Topics

Adding links to other topics in your collection is done through the tree view interface.

Editing Topic Properties

Every topic (or page) in a %product_name% publication is saved in a separate file. The Page tab is where you enter information that's not part of the page visual content.

Adding Links To Other Topics

Adding links to your topics is what makes your collection richer and easier to navigate. %product_name% provides you with many ways and time saving features to add links to your topics.

Adding images to a page

Before adding images to your topics, it is strongly suggested that you format these images to best fit your published web pages. You should also copy all images are in the online/images folder (see Site Folders Structure) unless you want to type longer file paths.

Inserting Content

There are different ways you can insert content in your topics.

Inserting Symbols

Using the right symbol at the right place is an important part of any professional publication. With %product_name%, you can insert any symbols you need to use by selecting from an menu or through one of the preconfigured editor toolbar.

Creating Accessible Content

Creating accessible content is important for many reasons. %product_name%, with the XStandard Editor make it easier than many other toolset to create accessible content.

Applying Styles

To markup your content, select the text you want to tag and then select the style from the drop down list that's found at the upper left of the editor window. The default style list contains the mostly used HTML tags.

Searching for Text

Searching your collection for text is done across all topics contained in the collection. You can search for text through the Search dialog window.

Spell Checking

%product_name% being a shareware desktop application, it cannot by default take advantage of the XStandard editor spell checking support, which is provided through a Web Service.

Checking Links

The print button is used to send the current page to the active printer.

Renaming and Deleting Topic Files

File naming strategies are an integral part of any file based management system and you should take great care in planning your system. The file system information page suggests a few approches you might want to consider.

Adding a Site Map

Adding a site map to your collection clearly shows your collection's structureand allows for an easier access to your publication.

Adding Markers

To guide authors through some editing tasks, you might want to add markers to your HTML or custom tags.

Locking Content

To guide authors through some editing tasks, you can lock some content while editing.

Reusing Content

While reusing small content snippets is great for inline content, larger content blocks can also be reused through a subset of the XInclude standard.

Generating Content

Content generation lets you add small content snippets during the publishing process.

Including Specialized HTML Content

Although %product_name% does not support form creation in the editor, you can include a reference to an existing XHTML file in any of your topic.

Inserting Code Snippets From The Clipboard

Inserting programming code in a web document has always been a bit challenging because of the indentation pattern of such content. While the pre HTML tag has been useful to this effect, using strategically marked up sorted lists provides many advantages, including:

Creating Custom Topic Types

Any publication can benefit from using different topic types, be it a tutorial, a FAQ page, and article, a recepie or anything meaningful piece of content that is relevant to your need.

Validating a Topic with Schematron

You can validate a topic using a subset of the Schematron Document Schema Definition Language (DSDL).