Bates WebGuide

Editing

Details

If you must override the Bates standard formatting, use the ICMS html editor to do it cleanly.

Use Wordpad to open Word documents before putting text into ICMS, to help remove extraneous tags.

Be prepared to manually remove extraneous tags, or use TidyGUI to help with this.

For ICMS technical support and training contact Renee Phelan

For new page types and design assistance contact Jay Collier

last update 06-15-06

Editing text elements in ICMS

Creating an effective BodyCopy HTML text block

The Golden Rule is:

Format your text as sparingly as possible.
Let ICMS do the work it was designed to do, which is presenting your data in an attractive format.

ICMS will automatically choose the font display options to conform to the Bates web standards, as long as you don't specify otherwise. In general, you should not use any FONT formatting unless you deliberately want to depart from the Bates style. For example, paragraph text will always display with a certain font face and size throughout the website.

Sometimes you will have to get into the HTML source of your BodyCopy text to clean up some stray tags, particularly when you wish to import text from an outside source.

The ICMS HTML Editor

ICMS comes with its own HTML editor. It can only be used to edit fields that are HTML sensitive (generally the BodyCopy and BodyCopy_Supplement fields only). In the BodyCopy you can format a paragraph by selecting it and using this menu to make the text larger, bold, or aligned right. If you're familiar with using Microsoft Word, you can use the formatting bar in ICMS. But keep in mind the Golden Rule: Format your text as sparingly as possible.

Importing text: Use Wordpad instead of Microsoft Word

Word document imports will generally be littered with formatting tags including <P class=MsoNormal> and <o:p></o:p>. These tags will cause problems in certain browser displays. The trick is to use Wordpad instead of Microsoft Word. Wordpad is fully compatible with Word, and lives under your start menu under Program Files>Accessories>Wordpad. You may wish to put a shortcut to Wordpad in your menubar. This is the optimal way to get clean HTML into ICMS:

From Wordpad, copy and paste or drag and drop the text into the Body Copy or Body Copy_Supplement area in ICMS.

By using Wordpad you'll get rid of all but the <FONT> specifications. Change your font as specified, and you'll have nice, clean HTML. (12 point Times New Roman (Western) is a default font for the web.)


Manually cleaning out HTML tags:

Although the above precautions should prevent it, sometimes HTML problems do "sneak" into your text. That's why you should always preview your page before publishing; if your formatting looks funny, it's probably because there are still some unwanted HTML tags in your document. The way to resolve this is to edit the HTML source manually (ONLY if you are proficient in html tagging, please). Right-click in the BodyCopy or BodyCopy_Supplement text block and choose EDIT SOURCE. The following tags typically cause problems:

 

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