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Collage Tips and Tricks: Archives
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Collage Tips and Tricks: Archives

Formatting Text Archives

Right column "arrow" bullets

When you add text to the right-hand column you can format it using an unordered list to display a list with arrow bullets.

Select the text you want to format,

Then click on the List button.

Select Unordered from the dropdown list.

Page Names

Use alphanumeric characters when naming a page. Avoid punctuation like commas, apostrophes, etc. Punctuation or foreign characters like "?" or "&" will cause the CMS to malfunction.

Bad stuff includes characters like æ * # & @, etc.

Get rid of old bold or italics - Clear Formatting

Clear Formatting is a link located on the bottom right-hand corner of the editing screen. The Clear Formatting link is especially useful in removing Styles from your body copy.

Copy/Paste Text from Word Documents

Never copy text directly from a Word Document and then paste it into a Serena Collage page. There are hidden tags embedded in Word that conflict with the Serena style sheets and cause web pages to load as blank.

You can save your Word document as plain text under the File menu (choose "Save As..." and make sure you change the format to Text Only). This will strip out your formatting, and give you a clean document whose content you can copy and then paste into Serena.

On a PC: It may be even easier to use Notepad (make sure not to use Wordpad). Open the Notepad application on your PC and paste the text from Word into your Notepad document. This will strip out all formatting and give you a clean document for copying/pasting.

On a Mac: You can use the TextEdit application (or even SimpleText), but as with Word, make sure you "Save As..." a plain text document. First, go to the Format menu and choose the "Make Plain Text" command. Then go to File>>Save As... and change the format to Text Only (the file must have the suffix .txt).

After you've pasted your text from Notepad (or TextEdit) into Serena Collage, you should have "clean" HTML. If for some reason you still see some formatting in the text, select that portion of the text and then click the "Clear Formatting" link at the bottom right-hand corner of your Serena Collage Edit window.

This will ensure that your Serena page does not have any stray HTML tags.

About Formatting Text

This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Collage Tips and Tricks in the Formatting Text category. They are listed from oldest to newest.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.