Adding a graphic to the FrontMatter page of the Structured Book template

Hi,

I would suggest that structuring a title page is more of a purist impulse, rather than a practical setup. As much as I like structure, it only adds value in certain situations such as:

- The document is authored/edited on a regular basis and you can leverage the guided authoring advantages of structure

- You need to export the document to XML

- You use any other nature of automation, content reuse, etc. that depends on the structural markup

I usually don't see a title page falling into any of those categories. Normally, it is just something short to look nice for the PDF and stays mostly the same, except for maybe dates, issue numbers, etc. So I never structure a title page.

I commend you for taking a look at structure and encourage you to continue. One thing I would like to note... these samples are quite old and primitive. Some of the element names are a bit archaic. And, for your sample specifically, the automatic formatting rules are not complete; for example, you can't get anything below a Heading3 by nesting the sections. I think it may be a great place to get accustomed to the environment, but you will almost assuredly want to customize and/or just build your own. Alternatively, there is DITA, but it comes with significant complexity and I have never found a practical use for it. Simple, custom EDDs have served me quite well for lots of years now and they are not hard to create. Best of luck with this and continue to ask questions as you need to.

Russ

Implementing the photo+text as an SVG would work:
► SVG text on top of…
► raster image
The whole thing should be passed through unmolested.

Of course it would raise other issues, such as the text not being populated by Variables (title, author, etc), and not being in-flow for selection in HTML. Some of that might be worked around with real text, set to invisible via Color Views in the source.