Cookbook Overview

Once you've entered some of your recipes, you're ready to take the next step and put together your recipe collection in a cookbook.

In its simplest form, a cookbook is a collection of recipes. But there's a little more to putting a cookbook together than simply stringing a few recipes together.

Think of the cookbook system at Family Recipe Central  as a more sophisticated online publishing system that lets you create an electronic cookbook with the flexibility you need, yet easy enough for everyone to use.

A cookbook contains four different elements including recipes, chapters, pages, and covers. These cookbook elements come together in a hierarchy as shown in the diagram above.

Four Cookbook Elements

• Cover - holds the artwork for the cookbook cover. Typically you would create a front cover and a back cover separately.
  
  
• Pages - any content including text and images. Use the pages for your title page, introduction page, divider pages between recipe sections, and anywhere you want to insert stories and content in between recipes.
  
  
• Recipes - these are the recipes you put in the system. The cookbook recipe element is actually a place holder to attach a recipe you've already created.
  
  
• Chapters - can hold pages and recipes, another level of organization. The chapter page can serve as the divider/section page for a group of recipes (like salads, desserts, side dishes, breads, etc. ) and can include text and images. Chapters introduce another level of hierarchy in your cookbook structure (chapters contain recipes and pages), and will also help you organize a table of contents (toc not yet supported).
  
  Note: chapters are a convenient and logical way to organize your cookbook, but note that you don't actually have to use chapters if you want to take a simpler approach. You can keep the hierarchy more flat in place of using chapters (that contain recipes and pages), you can just put section pages in between your groups of recipes and accomplish the same thing.

A bit of terminology

When you assemble the components (covers, recipes, pages, chapters) into a cookbook, we refer to this as a hierarchy. To top level container of the hierarchy is the cookbook. An element that contains other elements (for example, a cookbook can contain a recipe, a chapter can contain a page ...) is called a parent. An element that is contained by a parent is called a child.

A cookbook is a parent to children including covers, recipes, pages and chapters. And the chapter element can be both a parent and a child. A chapter is a child to the cookbook, and at the same time, a parent to recipes and pages that it can contain.

You will see the terms parent and child (children) on the various forms that you'll use to create and edit your cookbook.

When you put your cookbook together you can have as many of each element in any order that you want. The simplest approach is a front cover first, one or two inside pages (introduction, acknowledgements, author and publishing information, etc.), then a series of recipes intermixed with pages (use pages to interleave your family stories and pictures), as many as you need, and finish with a back cover.

A page element can contain more text than will fit or print on a single physical page. In other words, if you have a section of content that spans three physical pages, simply create a single page element which can contain as many consecutive pages of content as you need. The system will automatically flow the text and content on a single page element across multiple physical pages at print time (when you create the PDF).

OK, ready to get started? See the next step, "Add a Cookbook".