Editing Text in Contribute
Basic Editing: To edit text on a web page, click on the Edit button located on the left end of the toolbar.
Contribute EDIT button
The screen will change to edit mode and the page will appear as a draft. It is here that you can make text edits to the webpage just like you would in a word processing program. You can:
- highlight and delete text
- insert text by placing the cursor where you want to insert text and then begin typing
- copy text from another source (web browser, Word document, text file) and paste it into the web page.
External Text Editors: Using Contribute for small copy edits is usually sufficient. When drafting your text in external software it's best to use a simple text editor such as NotePad or WordPad rather than Microsoft Word. If you need to use MSWord, simply copy the text from Word, open Microsoft NotePad (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Notepad), paste the text into Notepad, then copy and repaste from Notepad into your Contribute page. This will remove the formatting that Word puts into its text and greatly reduces unnecessary code which can slow down the display of your pages. Not following this procedure can result in erratic display of your content through a browser.*
You can also add special characters to a page (copyright symbol, em dash, etc.):
- Place the cursor at the insertion point, and then
- Go to the dropdown menus and select Insert > Special Characters. Select a character from the submenu
Change Text Size: To change text size or color on a webpage you change its “style”.
- Select the text whose size you wish to change, or place your cursor at the appropriate insertion point
- Click the style dropdown menu
- select a new style from the UMass Boston styles list
Spell Check: It's recommended that when drafting large pages of content to use an external text editor rather than work within Contribute and then just cut and paste into Contribute. If you do some editing within the application, however, you can run a spell-check on the page when you are done. Go to the dropdown menus and select Format > Check Spelling and run the spell-check application in Contribute.
Spell check
Finding and Replacing Text To search for text, go to the dropdown menus and:
- select Edit > Find
- When the Find and Replace dialog box appears, enter the text you want to find in the Search For text box.
- Click Find until you have found the item you are looking for
- If you want to replace all instances of certain text in a document, you can enter the Find information and then enter the Replace word or words in the replace text box. Replace replaces the current instance with the replacement text, and Replace All replaces all of the instances.
Find Replace
*Mac users should use SimpleText when running OS9. OSX users should use BBEdit or other non formatting text editors when possible. TextEdit which comes with OSX uses a native rich text formatting as it's native format and is not recommended.