Any line in an outline that begins with a # does not flow through to the page.

#hairColor "brown"

Then the name becomes an attribute and can be referenced as a <%hairColor%>.

Example 14 illustrates the use of a directive to change the title of the story, using:

#text "A question maybe no one has ever asked you"

Without that directive, the title on the page would be Example 14.

This feature is especially useful at the top level of an outline file to control the appearance of the home page of the site, because there's no containing headline to attach attributes to.

It also makes it easy to group all your global values in one place, easily edited by the outliner,