Authoring Tips: Stylizing your content

Our online module editor (a graphical interface called "Edit-in-Place") gives you a lot of options. When you choose to insert a "list", you are given the option to create a bulleted list, a numbered list, a stepwise function, or a labeled item list. Oftentimes, a CNXML tag has a lot more versatility written into it than we can easily fit in a graphical editor, and to access them you will have to type them in yourself.

So how can find out what options you have? At the upper-right hand corner of every tag you can edit in Edit-in-Place is one of Connexions' best-kept secrets: a link to a cheat sheet with all the allowed attributes for that particular tag. It always has the format "Help editing <tag name>".

The link for <list>, for example, takes you to cnx.org/eip-help/list, where you will find attributes to change the style of bullet (or numbering) of the list, a way to make numbered lists begin at a number other than one, a character to separate each item in the list (like a comma or a period), and more. This markup creates a numbered list starting with number 50, with a colon after each number and a period after each item:

<list id="write-numbers-list" list-type="enumerated" start-value="50" mark-suffix=":" item-sep=".">
  <title>How to Write Some Numbers</title>
  <item>Fifty</item>
  <item>Fifty-one</item>
  <item>Fifty-two</item>
</list>

You can even stylize inline tags like <emphasis>. If you take a look at cnx.org/eip-help/emphasis, you see that you aren't limited to having your emphasized text always bolded. You can use <emphasis effect="italics"> to create italicized emphasis, <emphasis effect="underline"> to create underlined emphasis, or <emphasis effect="smallcaps"> to create SMALLCAPS emphasis.

By playing with the attributes and options allowed for each tag, you can create a module using your own conventions.

There is a complete list of all the tags in CNXML at cnx.org/eip-help/tags.