Customizer's Guide > Customizing Your Site's Profiling Configuration > Profiling Overview
  
Profiling Overview
Profiling is a means to provide specific content for a selected audience or for a specific application. Using profiling, authors can include all document variations in one file, and use profiles to control what elements appear in published versions of a document. By comparing the selected audience with each element's audience profile, Arbortext Editor strips out irrelevant content and assembles a custom publication.
Individual profiles specify that content can have one or more than one profile of a particular class. Classes may contain standard and unique profiles.
Standard individual profiles apply one or more profiles in a class to an element.
Unique individual profiles apply one and only one profile in a class to an element.
Two types of profile groups exist. Apply profile groups specify a collection of individual profiles defined as a named profile group an author can apply to an element in a single step. Set profile groups specify a collection of individual profiles an author can choose at publishing time in a single step.
Authors apply profile values to elements at editing time by setting certain element attributes to specific values as defined in profile configuration (.pcf) files. Individual document types reference the .pcf file containing the profiling definitions defined for the document type. Multiple document types can reference a single .pcf file.
You can configure colored shading to differentiate between profile, profile groups, or individual values. Refer to Using shading for profiled elements for further information.