HTML & Tagged Text
Text, Formatting & Markup
All document properties have a type, specifying the format of the property values. Currently Liquid Site supports three document property types; plain text, HTML and tagged text. All three are used for storing text and both the HTML and tagged text types allow storing formatting along with the text.
The plain text type is used for storing unformatted text. That means that any linebreaks or special characters in the text will be converted before displaying the text on a web page (i.e. in HTML). Plain text is often used for simple data, such as titles, author names, keywords and similar.
The other two text types maintain text formatting alongside the
text. They do this by marking the specially formatted text with
special tags, like "<b>word</b>"
for a word in boldface. There are several different tags
available, and they vary between the HTML and tagged text
formats.
The HTML text editor allows editing the text with markup in a visal manner, showing the results rather than the tags themselves. This editor is built into the web browsers Internet Explorer and Mozilla, but does not work in other web browsers such as Opera or Safari. The HTML text editor is also known for behaving strangely from time to time, something Liquid Site has no control over. For these reasons, it is recommended to use tagged text instead of HTML in most situations.
Tagged Text
Tagged text looks somewhat similar to HTML, but has been simplified in several aspects. The most important difference compared to HTML is probably that linebreaks are conserved to the output, making it simple to separate paragraphs by a blank line. Many of the tags in the tagged text are also different from HTML, making them easier to remember and use.
In order to create tagged text it is not necessary to remember all the tags available. The tagged text editor provides buttons and helper dialogs to make the creation of the tags much easier. The text to format is just selected, whereafter the appropriate button in the editor toolbar is pressed. See the figure below for an example of a text being edited in the tagged text editor.
Figure 1. The tagged text editor. At the top is the editor toolbar with buttons for nearly all types of formatting available in the tagged text format.
A description of the tags in the tagged text format is available in the online help that is opened by pressing the rightmost button in the editor toolbar.
HTML Text
The HTML text editor allows editing HTML either directly as it will be shown or in source mode. In the former mode, none of the HTML tags are visible and all formatting is done with the help of the editor toolbar. The HTML editor toolbar is mostly similar to the toolbar for the tagged text editor, which can be seen in the figure below.
Figure 2. The HTML text editor in direct formatting mode. All formatting is done by marking text and using the appropriate toolbar buttons.
As an alternative to using the toolbar buttons, the HTML editor source mode is available. While in this mode the HTML editor displays the actual HTML source code and allows direct manipulation of it. The HTMl source mode is activated by pressing the rightmost button in the toolbar, as seen in the figure below.
Figure 3. The HTML text editor in source view mode. No formatting toolbar buttons are available in this mode, but all HTML code must be entered manually.
The HTML editor is problematic in that it is not supported in all web browsers, has certains quirks in the formatting mode, and requires detailed knowledge of HTML to be able to control the formatting exactly. Also, the HTML layout mode is not able to properly display images or links. For these reasons the tagged text format is recommended over HTML for most cases.
Linking & Images
Both the tagged text and HTML support hyperlinking to attached files, web pages in the same site or to external web sites. The easiest way to add a link is to select the link button in the editor toolbar. This will bring up a dialog similar to the one in the figure below.
Figure 4. The tagged text add link dialog. The link type field allows selecting between normal links, links opening in a new window, and mail address links. In the link dialog for the HTML dialog, only normal links are available.
The link URLs entered will be processed differently depending on their type. The three different types of links are:
-
Absolute links (to other sites)
Links starting withhttp://,https://or another web protocol are considered absolute links and will not be processed. -
Root-relative links (within the same site)
Links starting with/are treated as relative to the web site root, and will be converted to normal relative links upon display. -
Relative links (to attached files)
Other links are treated as relative to the document itself and will be converted by adding the path to the document when needed. To link to an attached file, simply enter the name of the attached file as the URL.
Images are considered a special type of attached files. By attaching image files to a document, the images will become available for insertion in the tagged text or HTML. Pressing the add image button an image dialog like in the figure below will be shown.
Figure 5. The add image dialog. The image layout allows placing an image floating to the left or the right. In the HTML editor version of this dialog, no layout option is available.