The appearance of content pages that employ the Standard Document Type is completely defined by CSS Style Sheets. By providing your own style definitions you can customise almost all of the settings.
These could include:
In addition, you can define your own named styles that you can employ for elements or for inline sections. These enable you to highlight and embellish the content - if you wanted to have paragraphs, bullet points, headings or even individual words in bold purple Monotype Corsiva, you'd use CSS to define them.
Four style sheets are normally used, these are known as:
(Note - you don't have to get involved with these for bold or italic or underline, or to highlight words or phrases by use of colour. We set an objective of letting you write material that looks very much like like a Word document, and provided a mechanism for you to embed these effects directly into the text).
Only doc.css must be provided - if missing then the Internet Explorer default setting for your PC will apply and chances are that your documents won't look very nice. The Manuals Machine provides an initial version of para.css that includes a number of useful appearances, and which you can extend, and ships with empty custom.css and extensions.css files. You can modify one of the XSLT templates to change this order and invoke additional stylesheets including from external web URLs.
The priority for use of styles is as in the list above: doc.css (lowest priority and default settings), then para.css, then custom.css, and finally extensions.css (highest priority). Because The Manuals Machine's standard templates don't rely on any of the higher priority stylesheets, these are all yours to experiment with. You can experiment whatever beautiful or dramatic appearances you want, without worrying about things falling apart. If you supply invalid definitions the browser style selection will usually ignore them error and continue to use the defaults in doc.css. If you don't like your creations simply take them out again, and The Manuals Machine defaults will again prevail.
To provide custom appearances you need a good working knowledge of CSS. There many books and websites that address this topic.
Any page can be provided with a header - such as some headline text and a company logo. The Manuals Machine provides a number of inbuilt header types, and you can supply your own. Some of the inbuilt headers are able to include details of the chapter (not just the page). Some of them can include images, so you can provide logos for your own branding.
If you want to provide your own styles for text included in the standard headers, you add definitions to custom css. If you want to provide more complex header structures, then you must provide XSLT templates using the same methods as for Extending Content Types.
Manuals Machine table elements provide a simple table rows-and-columns presentation, used to set out sections of tabular content within the documentation. Several aspects of the appearance can be specified on a by-table basis, including background shading, row spacing, and font styles for rows and columns.
The Manuals Machine is designed to make it very easy to build Volumes quickly and achieve stylistic consistency across all their pages - just like you'd expect the pages in a reference book that you purchase to all follow a the publisher's "house style". It's also designed to make it easy to customise the styles that apply across the pages of any Volume - in the same way that book publishers have their own house styles, that usually are employed across a family of books.
Please note that unlike a wordprocessor, the Author/Editor does not expose a large range of functions for adjusting individual parts of pages. It can be done, and it's very simple to enhance text with bold/italic/underline and colour. But to do more you have to add your own XML markup (tagging), and to accomplish this and the purple Corsiva effect you have to be familiar with CSS and the use of the para.css style definition file.
The Author/Editor GUI doesn't offer wordprocessor functions of the "Format, Style, Modify" type with dropdown selector lists that could be used to insert any arbitrary appearance at any point. The emphasis of The Manuals Machine is to enable the page appearance for a complete Volume to be customised exactly as required by an administrator or editor, and to ensure that these apply reliably across all pages that are authored for the Volume without any need for further work by authors.
Where exceptional appearances are required, it can be done and there is a choice of mechanisms to accomplish. But to use these requires a degree of knowledge and training - it's not one of the point-and-click basics.