Size of Topics

It's important to keep the size of your topics in mind when you are creating and editing them.

For online output, topics are like pages on a well-designed website. They should not be too long, but should be long enough to provide useful information. There is no specific rule for determining how long to make your topics. It is mostly a matter of common sense. When you are developing a topic, ask yourself if it is something that you would find useful and easy to read.

For print-based output, topics can be strung together in the output to form larger chapters. It is recommended that you try to use relatively small topics when working in Central—usually no more than a few pages in output. Although you can certainly create a very long topic that holds all of the content for an entire chapter or manual, smaller topics allow you to take full advantage of Central's many powerful single-sourcing features. For example, with small topics, you can reuse them when generating many different outputs, all from the same project. You might want to use some topics in some outputs, but not in others. With large documents, that is very difficult, if not impossible to do.

Another reason to keep your topics (and snippets) relatively short has to do with reviews (see Reviews). If your file size is too large, it won't load in the Central review editor.