Text Article Element
From Gestaltipedia
The text element is one of the most versatile items in your article-assembly palette. It allows you to insert blocks of formatted text, formatted images, tables, pull quotes, even forms in limited circumstances. It's a powerful tool. It performs this work by using a small module that behaves a lot like a miniature word processor that lives inside of your web browser. In the current release of Gestalt 2, we use a software component called KTML to accomplish this.
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What you can do with this element
The text element this gives us one of the most versatile tools in the Gestalt toolbox. In some web content management systems, the equivalent of the text element and its various tools for formatting information, pictures, tables, and other components comprise the entirety of the management system. In Gestalt, however, it is simply another of many types of elements you can string together on a page.
Manipulating Images
Placing images inside of a text block (as opposed to adding the image with a standalone image element will give you the ability to position, scale, annotate, and format the image precisely the way you want it to appear.
Linking to other material
A text element allows you to generate links to other material in several different ways. First, you can simply highlight text and designate that text as a link. You can also highlight text and specify an item from the link scratchpad as the destination for that link. You can paste in destination link web addresses on image elements, and you can create links for pages which do not yet exist using the auto link builder.
Giving order to material
Organizing information in a text element is very easy and has a number of different approaches. You can organize information using a table, or, as a hierarchy using bullet points, outlined in notation, or simple indentation.
While tables have become less than fashionable in the recent history of web development, they are very useful when working inside of a text block. Since generally, the page template will keep anything you do inside of a text block from causing too much trouble to the overall layout, a table becomes a very convenient way of organizing information and positioning it within confines of the block. It can, of course, also be used in its traditional role to present information in a tabular format.
For more information, view the main article on manipulating rows and columns in text element tables.
The versatility of HTML
In fact, just about anything that can be done in raw HTML can be done inside of a text element block. The KTML. toolkit that we use to achieve this gives us the ability to manipulate that code without having to get our hands dirty most of the time.
Making use of special page template attributes
Some page templates in specific Gestalt configurations will be set up to let you apply certain style attributes within the body text of the article. For instance, if a template is designed to display text in two columns, the developer may have given you the ability to choose where the column breaks. See How to control column breaks in FSI web sites for an example of this.
Things to watch out for
Mangled URLs in link boxes
Occasionally, when you build a link in a text element, the link will inexplicably not work. Copying the URL directly from the browser or a link and pasting it directly into the editor-- you can paste it into another browser window, and it goes to the right place-- but, sometimes, a perfectly good link...
<source lang="dos">go.cfm?objectid=DED53900-433B-11D6-924100400536E9BB&searchterm=2008%20Democratic%20Convention</source>
When pasted into a link box in KTML, will end up being altered, like so:
<source lang="dos">go.cfm?objectid=DED53900-433B-11D6-924100400536E9BB&searchterm=2008%2520Democratic%2520Convention</source>
Subtle difference, yes, but the small things get paid attention to by our site just as much as anything. What's happening here is KTML is attempting to do you a favor where you don't really need one. You copied a URL from your clipboard which contained characters that are not expressible in a web address. Generally when this happens in your web browser, this text is escaped into a format which allows the original value to be extracted but works inside the limitations of web address conventions. When it is then pasted into KTML, the editor is re-escaping the already escaped text, substituting the special escape-clause characters for their own escaped values. Mind-bending, no?
Let's be clear, this is a bug that will get fixed. For now, though, we need workarounds:
The foolproof solution to the problem is to edit the HTML code of the link in question and remove the double-escaped values. This is tedious, though, and defeats the purpose of using the editor in the first place.
The alternative is to make sure the URL you're attempting to paste is not escaped in some way. You can clean it out using any number of online utilities, one of which is linked here [1]. Pasting in the text, then "unescaping" it, should provide a value that is safe to paste into KTML.
