More Advanced Procedures > Templates in Help & Manual

HTML templates are used to define the layout of all Help & Manual's HTML-based output formats (HTML Help, Webhelp, eBooks and Visual Studio Help). In topic pages what you enter in the editor defines the content, the templates define the framework in which your content is presented. The HTML templates are stored together with your project.

The same HTML topic page templates are used for the topic pages in all three formats. In addition to this there are also separate templates for the frameset file and the Table of Contents and Keyword Index frames used in Webhelp, where they emulate the HTML Help viewer user interface.

You don't normally need to think about HTML templates

For normal work with Help & Manual you don't have to think about what HTML templates contain and how to edit them. That is all handled in the background by the program. A simple style editor is provided that allows you to modify the basic layout of your pages in the associated output formats without having to edit the HTML code directly.

For everyday work you can adjust the settings of your HTML page templates just as you would adjust any of the other output settings in your Project Configuration settings. The simple style editor hides the HTML code with a point-and-click interface.

The HTML topic page template:

In new projects there is just one HTML topic page template called Default, which is assigned to all new topics automatically. It can be viewed and edited in the Configuration section of your project in the Project Explorer, in Configuration > HTML Page Templates, where you can also create new templates.

Among other things, the HTML topic page template defines the background colors of your topic and topic header in HTML-based output formats and the Top, Previous and Next navigation links displayed in the topic header in these formats.

The Simple Template Layout tab provides most of the functions you will normally need, see this topic for some basic instructions.

The HTML templates for Webhelp components:

There are also additional HTML templates for Webhelp, which define the layout frameset, TOC, Search, and Index components of the Webhelp user interface. These are accessed in Configuration > Publishing Options > Webhelp.

The background colors of topics and headers are set in the HTML page template for all output formats where they are relevant except Winhelp. Background colors are not used in RTF, PDF and printed manuals.

See Background colors and help viewers for details on how to set the background colors in the HTML page template.

If you are familiar with writing HTML Help & Manual's HTML templates are a very powerful tool that gives you a great deal of control over the appearance of your output pages in all HTML-based formats.

If you feel like getting under the hood and finding out what you can do with HTML templates have a look at the Using HTML Templates chapter in the More Advanced Procedures section.