WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The editor makes it easy to create sophisticated HTML web-pages without requiring any knowledge in the inner working of HTML.
The editor opens as a separate window when you click on the "Edit Content" link.
The Enter key will generate a new paragraph (in Internet Explorer): if you want a line break without a new paragraph, use Shift+Enter. This is the same way most word processors work.
Simply pressing Enter...
..gets a new para. But pressing Shift+Enter...
..gets a line break without a new paragraph.
The editor toolbar is similar to the one in Microsoft Word and should seem familiar:
The toolbar buttons allow you to format the selected text.
You can select text by dragging with the mouse, just as in other applications.
Double click to select a word.
Use the pull-down to choose heading styles that conform to the site style sheet. or Ctrl+B for Bold,
or Ctrl+I for Italic.
You should probably avoid using underline in web pages: people often assume underlined text is a link. You may want to use Ctrl+U to switch off underline on text you have pasted in from elsewhere.
Color text brings up the Color dialogue: you should use this sparingly or your pages may become too 'busy'. You can select a color from the palette or type in a color name or hex code (starting #), if you know it.
Highlight text also brings up the Color dialogue.
Indent text or
Remove indent
Justify, or align, text: left,
right,
centred.
Undo or
Redo your last change.
Bullets and
Numbers make selected paragraphs into lists, just as in your word processor.
brings up the Insert link dialogue, but you need to have some text selected first. So, first you select the text (click and drag) you want to make into a link, then, click the link button and enter the URL, or address of the page you want to link to. If you open the page you want in another window you can copy the link address from the address bar then paste it into the address field.
- To make an email link, replace the 'http://' with 'mailto:'
is the 'Clean up' button.
brings up the Insert Image dialogue. You can choose a picture from the website or upload a new one. The form lets you format the image:
Image address (URL): the address if you know it, otherwise click Browse.
Alternate text: The text that is displayed, or read out aloud, to users who cannot see the image. If left blank, Whizzywig inserts part of the filename.
Align: 'Normal' means the image is in-line, inside the text <-like that;
'Left' floats the image to the left of the page and the text flows around it;
'Right' floats the image to the right ->
Border: A number on its own gives the width of the border, in pixels, so '0' means 'no border'.
If you know a little CSS you can also specify a border using strings like
'3px outset blue' or
'thin dotted red' or
'2px solid pink
Photographs usually look better with a border set to
'1' or '1px solid black'.Logos should normally have border set to
'0'
Margin: A number on its own gives the width of the space round the image, in pixels, so '0' means 'no margin'. 5 or 10 are sensible numbers to keep text clear of images.
If you know a little CSS you can also specify a margin using strings like
'1em' (1 'M' character wide) or
'0 5px' (0 at top and bottom, 5 pixels at sides) or
'15px 0 30px 1em' (starting at top, going clockwise, 15 pixels at the top, nothing at the right, 30 pixels at the bottom, 2 'M' characters wide at the left. Top, Right, Bottom, Left: TRBL.
opens a image previewer window that lets you pick an image that is already in your cmsdocs directory.
In the image previewer, hover over a filename to preview it. The image previewer loads the image after one second. Click the image to insert it into your page.
You can insert a photo album at any location in the editor.
The photo album inserted into the editor looks different from how the album will look like on the actual page. The album shown in the editor has a red border around the photos. Do not directly edit anything inside the red frame. The outer frame is black and the inserted photo album name is added to the black frame. You can edit all text inside the black frame. You can also add additional information. The text inside the black frame belongs to the photo album. If you later delete or update the photo album, the text inside the black frame is lost.
the table button brings up a dialogue to insert a new table - unless you are already in a table, in which case it reveals the table editor buttons to
Add row above the current one,
Add row below,
Delete row
Add column before,
Add column after,
Delete column.
Table in cell creates a new table inside the current table cell.
You can use Copy (or Ctrl+C) and Paste (or Ctrl+V) on the Edit menu of Internet Explorer (or whatever browser you are using). This allows you to paste text from another application (e.g. a Word document) into to the edit area. This is useful if you already have text prepared in Word, or Excel, or another web page.
After you have pasted in from another application, you should make sure you have no text selected then click the
Clean up button on the toolbar.
This will make the text conform to the site style. The site style is controlled by a 'style sheet' and determines what fonts and colors to use for text and headings. Changes made to the style sheet affect every page on the site.
Clean up
- Clean up removes pre-set fonts and other unwelcome insertions added by Microsoft Office. Without using clean up, pasting in from an external application may introduce invalid HTML (mark-up code).
- Clean up preserves bold, italics, tables and bullet lists.
- On tables it attempts to remove the fixed width from columns, which makes them more easily viewed in a web page and more easily edited.
- Clean up may remove formatting you have added yourself.
If you click
with text selected it removes formatting (including bold, italics, etc.) from the current selection.