You can have one or more output formats in your Stationery. You can also define multiple targets in your Stationery. The Stationery Designer properties and options are shared across all targets and output formats. Some settings, such as the target settings, variable values, conditions, and cross-reference formats, are defined per target. Some targets and output formats also offer additional features and customizations.

For each target in your Stationery, define the following default settings in your Stationery. If a writer installs the support with ePublisher Express, that writer can modify these settings in each project based on the Stationery:

The index provides the user with a point-and-click resource for quickly navigating your online content. ePublisher generates the index by default for the available formats, using the native indexing features of the source document tool used to create the printed index.

The groups and order of index entries in your online index are determined through index entries defined in the source document, the locales.xml file in the ePublisher installation folder, and the output format display environment. The locales.xml file also defines the text that identifies See and See also style entries in your index. For more information about customizing the index appearance, see Modifying the Appearance of the Index in Dynamic HTML.

Depending on your output format, you can specify the file name for the generated index whether to generate the index. With the power of many full-text search engines, you may choose not to include an index in your generated output.

A variable provides a placeholder for standard terms and for names that may change. By defining variables in your source documents, you have global control over the values contained within those variables. For example, you can create a variable for the copyright date of your documentation. You can then use that variable as needed in your content. Each year when you need to update the copyright, you can change the variable value in a single location instead of using the search and replace method through your documents.

In your project, you can specify the value of any variable. When you change the value of a variable in your project, it changes the value only in your generated output. The variable value is not changed in your source documents. You can also use the value of the variable defined in your source documents. To use the value defined in a source document for a variable, select Use Document Value for that variable.

In your source documents, you can define conditions and use them to show or hide parts of your content. ePublisher allows you to define the visibility for each condition in your project. The conditions that are available in your project come directly from your source documents. You can modify the value for any of your conditions, which affects how your conditional text is incorporated into your generated output. You can also select passthrough for a condition to insert the content directly into your output without being transformed and coded for your output format. This option allows you to directly add HTML coding or multimedia files to your output.

Cross-references help users navigate through your content. ePublisher automatically transforms cross-references to links in the generated output. However, you often want cross-references in your online content to use a different format than your printed content. For example, you usually include page numbers only in your printed content. ePublisher enables you to add, edit, and delete cross-reference formats for your online output.

ePublisher provides PDF options that enable you to generate a PDF file for each source document or to generate a PDF file for each top-level group in a project. If you generate a PDF for each top-level group, ePublisher combines all the source documents within a single top-level group, and then generates a single PDF file for those documents.

You can deliver the PDF files separate from your help system, or in some output formats you can add a PDF button to your toolbar that displays the PDF files in the window. The PDF file displayed when the user clicks the PDF button depends on which PDF generation options you chose in your project. If you have selected to:

Content that must be accessed by people with disabilities must conform to guidelines published by both the W3C and the United States government. These guidelines are intended to help authors produce accessible content. ePublisher helps you produce online content that conforms to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG), Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1998, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

If you take certain steps in creating your source documents and setting up your project, your generated output is accessible through assistive technologies such as screen readers. When you generate your project, ePublisher can perform several checks to verify that you embedded information and conform to the accessibility standard in these areas:

For more information about producing accessible content, and to check your content further for compliance, see the following Web sites:

ePublisher does not perform accessibility validation by default. You must enable accessibility validation of the content. ePublisher validates that all images and image maps have alternate text, all images have long descriptions, and all tables have summaries. You can choose which accessibility validation checks you want ePublisher to run.

When a project based on this Stationery is generated, the accessibility report is created with the information you selected to include in that report.

In addition to the accessibility reporting features, ePublisher provides reports to help you identify and resolve potential transformation issues. You can define which conditions are informational messages, warnings, or errors. Errors force ePublisher AutoMap to return a non-zero return code and stops the output deployment process.