This section describes the general format of a Yodl document.

First of all, a Yodl document needs a em(preamble). This part
of the document must be at the top, and must define the modifiers and the  
document type. Modifiers, when present, must appear first.

Modifiers are often specific for a particular target document type 
(e.g., tt(latexoptions) or tt(mailto)), but may also have a general nature
(e.g., tt(affiliation) or tt(abstract)). All modifiers are used to modify
parameters of document types. Therefore, they must be specified before the
document type is defined.

All modifiers are listed in section ref(MODIFIERS). In general, you should use
as many modifiers as appropriate. E.g., you should define a tt(mailto) even
when you're not planning to convert your document to HTML. The reason is
twofold: first, you might later decide that a HTML version isn't a bad idea
after all. Second, later versions of the converters might use tt(mailto) even
for non-HTML output formats.

Following the modifiers, the em(document type) is defined. The document type
is either tt(article), tt(report), tt(book), tt(plainhtml) or tt(manpage).
Except for the tt(manpage) document type, which is a highly specialized
document type, described in section ref(MANPAGE), the following rules apply:

A decision about the document type to use should be based on its
complexity. If the document's organization becomes too complex, it is probably
a good idea to use a document type supporting a more complex
organization. E.g., a complex em(article) might be written as an accessible
em(report), combining related sections into chapters. Similarly, the structure
of a report having 30 chapters might improve when it's re-organized as a
em(book) having parts. To offer a rule of thumb: a document should have no
more than approximately ten top-level sections, and each top-level sectioning
should have no more than approximately ten subsections, etc..

The document type influences the way Yodl formats the output. An tt(article)
(or tt(plainhtml)) results in one output file. E.g., one final document when
converting to HTML. If your article is way too long, then the loading of the
HTML document also requires much time. When converting to HTML, Yodl splits
tt(report)s and tt(books) into files each holding a chapter. These can be
accessed through the table of contents. So, the document length can also be
relevant when you contemplate switching to a tt(report) or tt(book).

Documents using special macros, must have defined these macros em(before) they
are used. An appropriate location for these macros is immediately beyond the
preamble.  E.g., see the file tt(Documentation/manual/manual.yo) distributed
with the Yodl package.  This is the main file of this manual, showing the
preferred organization of Yodl files.

To answer em(yes-but-what-if) oriented minds, here are two results of the 
wrong order of text, preamble and modifiers:
    itemization(
    it() If you put text before the preamble, i.e., before stating the
document type, chances are that Yodl happily translates the file, but
subsequent states probably fail. E.g., the tt(<html>) tag would come too
late in a HTML conversion, causing the HTML browser to become confused.  Or,
the tt(\documentstyle) definition would be seen too late by the LaTeX
typesetter.
    it() If you put modifiers, such as tt(latexoptions), em(beyond) the
document type, then these modifiers have no effect; though Yodl won't complain
either. The reason for this being that the definitions of such modifiers are
encountered only  bf(after) the stage where they were needed....
    )

