ClickHelp User Manual

Styling Word Template

A Word template can be customized and styled according to your needs. This section will teach you how to change essential elements like headings, Table of Contents (TOC) items, and page backgrounds.

But first, let's talk about something important — the distinction between the content and template styles.

How Word Template Styles Are Applied to the Exported Document

Simply put, Word Templates do not influence the content of your topics.

This means that the styles defined in the template are not applied to the content you write in the Topic Editor. Your project's CSS files and styles you apply from the ribbon affect all of the underlying HTML in the topic content like the regular text, headings (<h1> and similar tags), links (<a> tags), and the content represented by the rest of the supported tags.

The Word Templates do not have any effect on any of this. The primary purpose of the Word template feature is to configure settings like headers and footers for odd/even pages and other Word-specific content, including:  

  • Printed-specific elements you modify in Word — headers, footers, cover page, etc.
  • The TOC automatically generated by ClickHelp during the export process — uses the Normal style but can be styled separately.
  • The topic headings automatically generated by ClickHelp before each topic. This behavior is optional and is enabled by default. These headings are influenced by the Heading 1 – Heading N styles from the Word Template.