Text and special characters

The vast majority of templates for personalized customer communications contain, of course, text. While the most common text element is a <p> or paragraph, other elements such as Headings (<h1> through <h6>) are also considered text elements. Text elements can be present within other types of elements such as table cells (<td>), boxes (<div>), etc.

Adding text

To add text, simply type in the workspace in the middle.

  • Press Enter to insert a new paragraph.

  • Press Shift+Enter to insert a line break.

Alternatively, use the Insert Lorem Ipsum toolbar button to insert dummy text, or copy-paste text into the template.
Select Paste as Plain Text from the Edit menu or the contextual menu to insert the text without any HTML styles or formatting.

Text that precedes or follows the value of a data field can be added by the Handlebars Helper Wizard (in the case of expressions; see Using the Helper Wizard) and the Text Script Wizard (see Using the Text Script Wizard).

Note: It is not possible to open a Word file in the Designer. When you copy text from a Word document, however, basic style characteristics travel with the content to OL Connect Designer. Formatting options like bold, italic and formats like Heading 1, Heading 2 are maintained.

Extra spaces

When you add spaces in Design or Preview mode the editor automatically preserves any extra spaces by converting them to non-breaking spaces ("&nbsp;" in HTML). It does this because in HTML extra spaces are generally removed. Take this into account when you edit the template in Source mode (i.e. in HTML) or add text via a script.

This how-to describes another way to maintain extra spaces in the text: Maintain extra spaces in text.

Adding special characters

To add special characters:

  1. Position the cursor where the character should be inserted.

  2. On the Insert menu, point to Special Characters click Symbols, Dashes and Spaces, Arrows, or Geometric Shapes, and click one of the available special characters.

Adding page numbers

Page numbers can only be used in the Print context. See Page numbers .

HTML element: p, h, li and others

When adding elements, such as text, images or a table, to the content of a template, you are actually constructing an HTML file, which you can see and edit on the Source tab (see also: Editing HTML).

In HTML, text can be contained in many different elements: paragraphs, span elements, line items and table cells, for example.

The HTML tag of a paragraph is <p>. The paragraph should be followed by a closing tag: </p>.

A line break looks like this in HTML: <br>.

Only the Source tab requires that you write HTML. In Design or Preview mode the editor adds HTML tags as needed.

Formatting text

Text can be styled, colored, centered, indented etc. It can even be displayed so that it reads from right to left. See Styling text and paragraphs.

In all templates you can use the fonts that are provided with the Designer, as well as imported fonts; see Fonts.

Translating text

OL Connect templates can be multilingual. For information about multilingual templates and how to create them, see Translating templates.