Customizing Author-it: An Overview
One of the first things folks want to do when first starting to use Author-it is customize the outputs. However, to successfully create customized outputs, the three basic tenets of Author-it must be understood:
- Styles control paragraph and character formatting.
- Media objects control all aspects of layout, including page margins.
- Templates control all associated objects. Internal templates control the appropriate objects within Author-it; external templates control the output.
Typically, style modifications cause few problems (lists seem to be the most prevalent). Four tabs in the paragraph Style dialog box define the formatting:
- Style Definition is where you define how the style will look in Author-it. The big thing to remember here is that what you see while working in Author-it is not necessarily what you'll see when you publish. THIS IS NOT A BAD THING. See Do You Suffer from Compulsive Obsessive Pagination Syndrome?. Also, the style name on this tab is used when creating the CSS for HTML outputs.
- Document is where the Microsoft Word name is described. This style name is mapped to the Word template.
- Windows Help is where the style is defined for publishing to WinHelp.
- HTML is where the style is defined for the HTML outputs. When publishing, Author-it takes the definitions for the styles that have been used in the book and stores them in the default CSS, called stylesheet.css. (You might be wondering why the name of the CSS file matters. Well, if you create a custom CSS for use with Author-it, you want to name that CSS anything but stylesheet.css, or your custom file will be overwritten during publishing.)
