The TMP Manual

Please sign in to your membership account, or, if you are not yet a member, please sign up for your free membership account.

Text-Editing

What is Text-Editing?

Text-Editing is when we take an article or announcement, and prepare the text for publication. This involves fixing spelling and grammar, adding website coding, and formatting the text to look good and match the style of our website.

Why do we need to add website codes?

Imagine that you wrote a simple document, like this:

If you were somehow able to put that document online, and look at it in a web browser (like Google Chrome), you would see this:

Now it's all messed up! The spaces are gone. What happened? The problem is that there are no webpage codes, and the browser doesn't understand how to display the document correctly.

HTML

Tell me about these codes.

These webpage codes we're talking about belong to something called HyperText Mark-Up Language – or HTML, for short. It was invented to help computers understand what humans write.

What do these codes look like?

The codes are visible in our documents, but invisible when the computer displays the webpage. You can recognize an HTML code – they are called tags – because they start with and end with angle brackets: <>

Show me some tags.

There are two kinds of HTML tags. The first kind are tags that are used by themselves. You can recognize them because they always end with />. For example, here is the tag known as the horizontal rule: <hr /> When you use it in a webpage, it creates a horizontal line:

---

And there is another type of tag?

Yes, there are also tags that are always used in pairs. So there will be a starting tag, then usually some text, then an ending tag. You can recognize a starting tag because it never has a slash – / – in it. And you can recognize an ending tag because it starts with a slash. So, for example, here are a set of paragraph tags: <p> </p> If you put them around some text, the browser will know that is a paragraph, and give it the proper spacing. So if we add paragraph tags to our original document...

...then the browser will understand that we want proper spacing for paragraphs, and give us: