Help Builder uses a combination of templates, CSS Style sheets and HTML that you create as part of your topics to handle the visual characteristics for your topics. The general idea is that the CSS Stylesheet and template handle most of the formatting for you, so that as you create topics you can focus on creating the content for the topic and use only relatively minimal custom markup in your topics.

• Templates
  Each specific topic type in Help Builder maps to an HTML based template that describes the overall HTML layout of the topic. When a new project gets created these templates are located in the project's TEMPLATES directory and marked with a WCS extension. Each of these templates is a mixture of HTML and some script tags that embed the content of your help topics into the template. You can customize each template and as you do every topic that uses the matching Topic type changes accordingly. Change TOPIC.WCS and all topics of type TOPIC will immediately reflect this change. Changing an individual template affects only topics of the matching Topic type.

• CSS Style Sheet
  Where templates affect individual topic types, the project's Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) affects the entire project. The templates exclusively use the the CSS style tags to configure the display of the Help File. The CSS settings are global and making a change to the CSS content will affect all topics of the help file.

• Custom HTML Markup
  Finally you can add custom HTML markup to your topic content. When you type your Body text you can embed HTML either using the double chevron (< >) formatted HTML syntax Help Builder supports, or by embedding raw HTML content into blocks inside of your topic. Typically this level of markup should be minimal relying primarily on the options that are available from the HTML Editing toolbar, but you can embed any HTML, including script code or DHTML, even XML islands into your topic content.
  

We highly recommend that if you plan on building elaborate HTML designs that you try to get as much of your content and formatting into the CSS Style sheet and template, to reduce the amount of custom markup that needs to go into individual topic content.