The Body Proxy
Last time out we looked at the masterpage. We used the analogy of a picture frame, where the masterpage was the frame and the body proxy the “hole” where the picture (our topic) goes.
To make the masterpage usable we need to add a body proxy. If you used one of the provided masterpages or modified one of the provided masterpages, the body proxy is already added for you. If you are feeling adventurous and creating a masterpage from scratch, you have to add it.
Insert -> Proxy -> Insert Body Proxy… Yep, that’s all you have to do. If you try to open the menu command in a page that isn’t a masterpage (it has a .flmsp extension) the command isn’t enabled.
It’s more than likely you’ll have at least 2 masterpages – 1 for online and 1 for print. The online may have breadcrumbs at the top and a mini-toc at the bottom. Below the mini-toc you may have a copyright message.
If you look at the “You are here: How to section” you will see the content created by the breadcrumb proxy. It’s a navigation aid.
Next is the actual topic. There’s a heading, “How to”, and some content.
Then we have the mini table of contents. It shows the topics in the same “book” as the current topic in the table of contents used by Flare when building the project output.
At the bottom is a copyright message, which is just text entered on the masterpage. In this case the text is a snippet, but that’s another story. A snippet is a block of formatted text you can insert anywhere. If you update the snippet it automatically updates the content of the snippet wherever it’s used.
Our printed masterpage has another trick up its sleeve – we can set the properties for the printed page. If we think about a word document we can set paper (page) size, margins, and so on. We don’t worry about that sort of thing in online help – online help normally fills the available window and wraps the text as the window resizes. If we click on the body proxy itself, a context menu opens with the option Edit Body Proxy… Select this option.
This is where you select your paper size! In the Page Size drop-down there are all the metric paper sizes. Being an Australian, I select A4.
You can format the page numbering, both page number format and start number, in the Page Numbers section. So, in the previously quoted example of restarting the page numbering when the front matter ends, you would set the Start Number to 1, leaving it at default would mean it would continue from the previous document section.
You can use the Page Type to control page breaks so the topic using the master page starts on the correct side of a duplex document. If you want it to be verso (right side) or recto (left) you can select odd from the Type drop-down list for verso pages or even for recto.
