Associating Primary Page Layouts With Projects

After you create a page layout and configure its frames and settings as necessary, you need to associate the page layout with the appropriate content. In most cases, you will probably want to associate different page layouts with various entries in your outline TOC (so that different page layouts can be used for different parts or chapters in a manual)—see Specifying Chapter and Page Layout Breaks. Otherwise, you would associate a single "primary" page layout with an entire target or project; in that case, the same page layout will be applied to all topics in that target or project. You can associate a page layout with an outline TOC entry with or without creating a chapter break at the same time. See Page Layouts.

The following steps show how to associate a primary page layout at the project level.

How to Associate a Primary Page Layout With a Project

  1. Select Project > Project Properties.
  2. Select the Defaults tab.
  3. Click in the Primary Page Layout field, and from the drop-down, select the page layout that you want to use for all topics in the project.
  4. Click OK.
  5. Click Save the active file. to save your work.

Note There is an order of precedence with the three levels where you can specify a page layout. Specific entries in an outline TOC have the highest precedence, followed by page layouts at the target level, followed by page layouts at the project level. If you have a page layout set at the project or target level and it does not seem to be working the way you think it should, you might check to see if you have any page layouts set on specific TOC entries that are overriding the target- or project-level setting.