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essays:online_essay_editor_manual_for_instructions

<!– uid=38ef530386634042d8f838271aa1371e347f0571 –> <!– time=1327607301 –> <!– ip=86.67.96.72 –> <!– content-type=text/html –> <!– name=An Keqiang –> <!– email=campumoru@gmail.com –> Overview

A WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) rich text editor is provided to type in the instruction, which means that you can apply things like bold face, lists, and so forth with simple controls and edit while viewing the actual formatted content rather than having to see the underlying codes. The top gray header of the editing box has a series of controls represented by icons which give short labels when you hover your cursor over the icon. It is used in the following VCP applications, all of which have their own editorial manuals in general:

We suggest that you prepare your text offline in a word processor, and then when complete, copy and paste it into the editor and add any extra formatting you need therein. You can always come back later and edit online. Please note that you can copy and paste directly from WORD into the WYSIWYG editor and it will preserve header styles, list styles, and formatting such as italic, bold, and underline. Therefore, if you know how to use styles, it is easiest and most efficient to apply the heading styles, styles for lists, and formatting such as bold, italic, and so forth in the Word document, and then copy and paste this into the WYSIWYG editor. If for some reason the text is garbled when you do this, delete all the text you pasted into the editor, hit the cancel button, and then open the editor again, copy the text again from the Word doc, and paste it into the editor. If the text is still garbled, then use the “paste from Word” button (the icon is a blue W) on the toolbar in the WYSIWYG editor, and paste the text you copied from your Word file into the window that opens when you click the “paste from Word” button. It will strip the entry of that code, but still try to preserve the formatting.

When editing descriptions, we suggest using the “fullscreen mode,” which devotes the entire browser window to the text entry box. You can toggle this mode off and on by clicking on the first button in the toolbar, which is a blue icon of a monitor. Please note that you cannot save in the fullscreen mode, and you will have to toggle it off in order to save. Once you are finished, or in order to save your work, click on the “Create” button at the bottom; once created, in the future you must click on the “Update” button to save. Please note that there is no saving as you type, and so you are strongly advised to periodically click update and then open up for editing again if you are working on an entry online for an extended period of time. Otherwise you risk losing any unsaved work if something goes.

When writing general descriptions, please do your best to make them accessible to a broad audience by giving necessary context to your statements. Standard Editor Buttons The following is a full list of all buttons on the rich text editor toolbar apart from the VCP custom buttons in the order that they appear:

  • Toggle Fullscreen Mode: * Bold: makes selected text bold; can also invoke through keystroke Ctrl+b. * Italic: makes selected text italic; can also invoke through keystroke Ctrl+i. * Underline: makes selected text underline; can also invoke through keystroke Ctrl+u. * Strikethrough: puts a line through selected text. * Undo: undoes whatever action you just did; can also invoke through keystroke Ctrl+z. * Redo: redoes whatever action you just undid with the undo action; can also invoke through keystroke Ctrl+y. * Insert/edit link: * Unlink: * Insert predefined template content: * Select style: this enables you to select headers for section; use heading one for your top level sections; heading two for sub-sections; heading three for sub-sub-sections, and so forth. * HTML: this gives you an editing window that shows you the underlaying code, which is helpful if something goes wrong with the rich text editor and you need to delete some stray code. * Cut: cuts the selected text. * Copy: copies the selected text. * Paste: pastes in the selected text. * Paste as plain text: * Paste from Word: always, always use this if you are pasting in from Word to avoid garbage code coming into the Place Dictionary from Word and creating many problems. * Unordered List: formats selected text into a bulletted list. * Ordered List: formats selected text into a bulletted list. * Outdent: only is active if the selected text is indented; each time you apply it, it removes one level of indentation until finally the text is flush with the margin again. * Indent: indents the selected text; each time you apply it, it indents the text further. * Align Left: aligns selected text to the left margin. * Align Center: centers the selected text. * Align Right: aligns selected text to the right margin. * Remove Formatting: removes any formatting like bold, etc. from the selected text. * Insert Custom Character: this gives you a popup of unusual characters you can choose to insert into your text. * Inserts a new table: * Table row properties: * Table cell properties: * Insert row before: * Insert row after: * Delete row: * Insert column before: * Insert column after: * Remove column: * Split merged table cells: * Merge table cells:

SOURCES

We are currently working at integrating VCP's bibliography program into the online essay composition system. In the meantime, if you want to have a sources section, please put the word “Sources” at the end of your text, and before any possible “Notes” section. Make it a header 1, and then list out the relevant sources. FORMATTING OF TEXT Quotation Marks and Apostrophes

Quotation marks and apostrophes should be “smart quotes” (that is, the curvy single and double quotes, such as “ ” ‘ ’) rather than straight single and double quotes (“ ') for all text.</span></p> Italics When giving italic words that are in parentheses, be careful not to italicize the parentheses themselves. Thus you would enter: (pinyin), not (pinyin). Endnotes/Footnotes

Unfortunately, there is no automated way to nicely create endnotes or footnotes. However if you want them, there is a manual way to do so.

Unfortunately, this system does not automatically resequence the footnote numbering, so that if you later add a footnote in the middle, then all your numbering will be off. At present, we can only offer two solutions to this:

  1. go through and manually renumber all footnotes in both the body of the essay and in the notes section at the bottom. This is the best solution, but really only practical if you just have a couple of footnotes. Otherwise it is very tedious. - use “a”, “b” and so forth, so that if you insert a new note after footnote 2 in a document that already has plenty of footnotes, it is called “2a”

Here are the instructions for manually inserting footnotes into your document:

  1. Click the Edit button to edit the description - In the rich text editor toolbar, click on the “HTML” button, which is at the right end of the top row. This will open a new window showing the description with the HTML markup. Don’t be alarmed by all the angle brackets! - Go to the point in the text where you want to insert the footnote. - Insert: <a href=”#fn1“>[1]</a>, where “1” represents the footnote number - Do this for all the footnotes in the body of the text, substituting the appropriate note number. For example, for note 2: <a href=”#n2“>[2]</a> - Then after the end of the text, insert a line that says: <h1 class=“Paragraph”>Notes</h1> - Then you need to insert the corresponding footnote reference in the footnote section, which begins right after the “Notes” header - For footnote 1, insert <p><a href=”#n1“>1</a> INSERT HERE THE ACTUAL TEXT OF THE FOOTNOTE</p> - Do this for all the footnotes in the footnote section, substituting the appropriate note number. For example, for note 2: <p><a href=”#n2“>2</a> INSERT HERE THE ACTUAL TEXT OF THE FOOTNOTE</p> - Click the “Update” button at the bottom of the html editor window. - This will take you back to the WYSIWYG editor window. Click the “Update” bottom for that window. - If the description you just edited is not open, open it by clicking on the plus sign next to it - Test to make sure when you click on the footnote number in the body of the text it jumps to the footnote itself, and when you click on the footnote number in the footnote it jumps to the footnote in the body of the text. Do this for each footnote to make sure they all work.

If you are interested in an explanation of the HTML markup: the principle is that in an <a> tag, the value of the name attribute is an anchor point; when you create another <a> tag with the attribute href=”#+value of a name element in another <a> tag“, it creates a link to the <a> tag with the name element you specified after the #. Endnotes/Footnotes with Microsoft Word

When you paste text into the WYSIWYG editor from a Word document, you can paste in footnotes also. The editor will preserve the formatting, including the line at the bottom of the page that divides the body of the Word doc from the footnotes.

You then need to manually reformat the notes, following this procedure:

  1. Save the description - Click the Edit button to edit the description - In the rich text editor toolbar, click on the “HTML” button, which is at the right end of the top row. This will open a new window showing the description with the HTML markup. Don’t be alarmed by all the angle brackets! - The first footnote number in the body of the text should be inside square brackets [ ]. To find it, do control-f (Windows) or command-f (Mac) to activate the search box, and then type in [1] and hit enter - You will find that there is some html code around the footnote number. It should look something like this: <a href=”#_ftn1“>[1]</a> - Edit the markup so it looks like this: <a href=”#fn1“>[1]</a> - Do control-f (Windows) or command-f (Mac) to activate the search box. [1] should still be the text in the search box; if it is not, type it in. Then hit enter. - The cursor should now be somewhere close to the bottom of the text in the window, having located the corresponding footnote in the footnote section. You will see some html markup around [1], which should look like this: <a href=”#_ftnref1“>[1]</a>. Edit the markup so it looks like this: <a href=”#n1“>[1]</a> - Do this for all the footnotes in the body of the text and the footnote section of the text, substituting the appropriate note number. For example, for note 2, search on [2]. In the body of the text, replace the markup with this: <a href=”#fn2“>[2]</a>; in the footnote section, replace the markup with this: <a href=”#n2“>[2]</a> - Click the “Update” button at the bottom of the html editor window. - This will take you back to the WYSIWYG editor window. Click the “Update” bottom for that window. - If the description you just edited is not open, open it by clicking on the plus sign next to it - Test to make sure when you click on the footnote number in the body of the text it jumps to the footnote itself, and when you click on the footnote number in the footnote it jumps to the footnote in the body of the text. Do this for each footnote to make sure they all work.
essays/online_essay_editor_manual_for_instructions.txt · Last modified: 2013/04/07 21:23 (external edit)