Most of the web-editor buttons are intuitive and moving the mouse over the respective button will bring up a tool tip.
However, copying from MS Word brings in a lot of markup "garbage" that can break the correct rendering of a site. It is best practice to copy the plain text and do the formatting within here. Copying plain text can be done either by copying and pasting into a plain text editor such as the windows native "Notepad" or the freeware "Notepad++" and then copying and pasting from there into the browser editor.
A quicker option to quickly paste as text is to activate the "Paste as Plain Text" function. Please note that this button stays only active for ONE paste action and needs to be pressed again for further copy processes. Coyping and pasting once the text is within this editor can be directly done by keeping all the formats.
Standard Formats
- Standard formatting tools that need no further explanation are bold, italic, underline - that also work with Ctrl+b, Ctrl+i, or Ctrl+u.
- There are also buttons for superscript and subscript functionality.
- Text can be formatted left, centered, or right aligned. For this site we do not allow justified spacing as reads really bad on websites.
- Lists can have bullets or numbers - hitting the Tab key at the beginning a line creates a further intended sub-list; the same functionality is offered by the two tool buttons to move a list further in or out.
Block Style
- " - this is a special call-out format. Use this with care to make a call-out from a certain paragraph. This can be used for a focus statement in a story
- Format - HTML offers six levels of paragraph Formats that can be used for heading - please note that the first three headings are typically already used for titles and subtitles - so please use Heading 4, 5, and 6. Normal paragraphs should be used for standard text.
- Styles - HTML allows to style special section with different predefined mark-up (styles), which can be set for a selected text section. Offered styles may differ for the different sites within the MLSoC domain.
Insert Elements
- links - You can insert HTML links to other sites - please note that first need to select a text, then click the chain-link button, and enter the URL you want to link to into the respective field. For Target, please select "open in new windows" if you link to content outside of our sites.
- unlink - this breaks the HTML link that has been set before. Set the cursor into a linked section in your text, then hit the break-chain button. The link will be removed from the mark-up (and is gone!)
- anchor - anchors are set bookmarks that can be linked to within a (very long) page.
- image - PRO use only! Please do not use inline images unless you know what you do - use the image upload field provided in the main form, which takes care of all the resizing and rendering.
- media - PRO use only!
- – ... inserts a horizontal line - use with care (i.e. avoid) as it can break the rest of the page layout.
- Ω - special characters - this allows you to insert special characters that you may want to use from the standard unified font set.
Other - Clean-Up
- paste as Text - this is a highly helpful function when pasting from MS Word or other sources such as other websites. All of these use a lot of hidden mark-up that can have unpredictable results (and often not visible results until you see the full page). It is a best practice to just paste the text and then use the formatting options described above to change anything if at all necessary.
- eraser - this tool allows you to select a section of text (or all) and remove any hidden mark-up that may be in your text. Though it doesn't clean up all mark-up, it catches most of it (such as irregular font sizes etc.)
- find & replace - should not need any further explanation
