Creating Element Templates

Provides a method to add predefined structure and content to new files.

An element template is an FM binary file that contains structural and textual content that is inserted into a new topic when it is created. You can have many different element templates for each topic type. Available element templates may be selected in the New DITA File dialog.

By default, element templates are stored in the folder that contains the structure application template file. You can specify another folder (local or network location) to store these files in the New File Options dialog which is available from the New DITA File dialog or the Options dialog.

Element template files must follow a strict naming convention in order to appear in the list in the New DITA File dialog. The file name pattern is new~<topictype>~<template name>.fm. That is “new” followed by a tilde followed by the topic or map element type (such as “topic”, “concept”, “task” etc.), followed by a tilde, followed by the name that you want to appear in the list, with an “.fm” file extension.

To create an element template just create a new DITA file and insert the elements and content that you want in the template, then save this file to a binary FM file into the specified element template folder. Note that when the new file is created using your template, the text of the title element will be replaced with the text entered in the New DITA File dialog, and the ID attribute of the root topic will be replaced with a new unique ID (assuming that the “auto-add IDs” option is enabled in Options).

Sample topic and task element templates are provided in the DITA-FMx Topic application folder.