Profiling sections of documents let you designate that certain sections contain information targeted at a specific audience or contain information that only applies when a particular set of circumstances exists.

For example, you may wish to designate that several sections of document contain information that pertains only to readers with a particular piece of software installed. By profiling this information for this specific audience, at publishing time you can easily create two different documents: one that contains this profiled information for those users who need it, and another document that excludes this information for those users who do not have the particular piece of software.

Another example is profiling the information so that content targeted at novice readers and content targeted at expert users was profiled as such.

You set the profiles you wish to publish at publishing time. Only those sections of the document that are unprofiled or have the same profiles applied to them as those profiles you set at publishing time appear in the published document.

Specifically, profiling is applied to elements in a document. Profiles are inherited by the children of a profiled element. For example, if you apply profiles to an entire chapter, all elements within that chapter inherit the same profile values. You can apply more restrictive profiling to individual child elements. Profiles cannot be applied to namespaced elements.

The profiles you can apply to your content are specific to your site and are defined by your site's administrator in your document type's profiling configuration (.pcf) file. Based on this configuration, certain profiles may only be allowed on certain elements. For details on configuring profiling, refer to Customizing your Site's Profiling Configuration in the Customizer's Guide.

You can apply two types of profiles to elements:

Content that has no profiles applied to it is considered to be part of every profile.