Working with the Editor

The advanced text editor for larger text fields follows the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) principle and shows text closely as it will be displayed later on the site. However, the final rendering may still differ as field witdth and underlying stylesheets may have an effect on the final representations.

Please Note: The text editor may initially show only a limited number of lines (i.e. height) but the size of the edit window can be changed to fit screen availabiliyt by dragging the handle of the lower right corner with your mouse to a different position:

 

Formatting Your Content

Character Formats

Bold, Italic, and Underlined are the formatting options available in the basic editor. These options can also be set through the following key combinations"

  • Bold (Ctrl+b)
  • Italic (Ctrl+i)
  • Underlined (Ctrl+u)

Paragraph Alignment

Paragraphs (and containing objects such as images) can be set left, centered, or right.
Please note: When you directly select an image (as compared to having your cursor on a line containing an image) and you click the left- or right-align button, this will set the image floating to the left or right, with any other content floating around it.

Bullet- or Numbered-Lists

Paragraphs can be converted to bulleted or numbered lists. By intending (TAB key) or out-tending (keys Shift+TAB) a paragraph within a list a sub-list can be generated. Bullet markers and line spacing may differ on the final page depending on underlying stylesheets at the final location within a page.

Pasting from Other Sources

Unfiltered pasting from other webpages or text documents such as MS-Word documents can easily break  the site format (e.g. in terms of fonts, margins, layout, etc.) as a fleet of hidding mark-up typically also gets copied. A much cleaner (and better) approach is to copy content as plain text and then use the editors format options to style the text with locally available formatting options.

To simplify the pasting process the editor provides several options:

  • Pasting text only - this button opens a pop-up window, where any content can be pasted and is then stipped down to pure text content.
  • Pasting from Word - this button provides an option to preserve some compatible formats from a text but may end up in undesirable results.
  • Remove Format - this button allows to remove any format that may have been copied to be stripped from the selected text section. Use this function to clean up copied content that breaks the layout on the site.

Built-in Paragraph Formats

The site is built on stylesheets following a multi-level hierachy.

  • Headings: "Heading 1" and "Heading 2" are mostly reserved for Page Title and top-level heading, anything below can be used to style content.
  • Standard Paragraphs: "Normal" is the standard paragraph format.
  • Special Formats: There may be additional paragraph options such as "Formatted", which is a special format that can be used for code or numbers, where content needs line up at the same position in each line.

HTML Source

If all efforts fail, the HTML Source code button switches the content to a plain HTML text mode, where tags can be inspected to identify underlaying issues. Please note that HTML code entered in this mode will not necessarily be rendered as such since a series of filters removes any not-allowed markup.