The publish tool combines the best parts of the report generator, the export facility, and the print tags feature into one powerful tool which allows you to create HTML documents.  If you're interested in placing your specimen data on a Web site, whether for personal, professional, or commercial purposes, you'll find the publish tool is a fast and efficient way to do it.  If you're preparing a printed manual or a book of your plant data, the publish tool is a great way to produce a printed version of your collection.  If you're looking for alternative ways to print specimen tags, the publish tool has pre-defined templates for plant stakes, arboretum tags, and nursery placards.

The publishing tool uses a multi-step wizard to guide you through the process of creating Web pages, indexes, table of contents, labels, and much more.  To learn the basic procedures for publishing see the notes beginning with the Step by step guide to publishing.

If you or a colleague knows how to use an HTML editor, you'll be able to customize the style sheets and the template files used by the publish tool.  Sophisticated users can create their own HTML files to be used as templates.  For an introduction to how the publish tool combines data from your collection with style sheets and templates see the document An overview of how the publishing parser works.

When you've finished creating the HTML pages, you can copy them to your Web server (or your Internet Service Provider) to make them available on the Internet.  There are no hidden files or special rules to worry about.  You can copy the entire "Publish" directory or just those files that you've modified.  Note that if you've used any of the templates that contain navigational buttons (next, previous, detail, or summary), you'll want to be sure to copy the hyperlinked documents too so that there are no broken links.