Style Guide
The University of Leeds Style Guide is available to download from the Communications site.
Copying and Pasting from Microsoft Word
Pasting text from Microsoft Word will preserve most of the formatting (including bold, italic and hyperlinks) while stripping out formatting used by Word (which can sometimes result in a page being un-editable). However, any embedded objects (Word Art, graphics, images etc.) will need to be copied separately, uploaded to the media library and inserted from there. If you experience any difficulties editing the text once it has been pasted in, or notice any formatting discrepancies on the page, it is likely that additional formatting has been pasted into the page which will either need to be stripped out manually (in text mode), or the content re-pasted into the editor using the “Paste as plain” text feature (you will see this button if you reveal the second row of controls in the rich text editor by clicking the button on the right side of the top toolbar).
Using Tables
When pasting from a Word document using the “Paste from Word” button, tables are left intact. They are quite difficult to format for a web page though, so consider using alternate formatting if the content is not tabular data. Thjere are tools to edit tables in the visual editor, but they need to be enabled using the TinyMCE Advanced plugin (settings for which can be accessed in the Settings->TinyMCE Advanced menu by the site administrator). One thing tables retain from Microsoft Word is a strict pixel width which is applied to all table cells. This could break the layout of the page in some cases, and removing the width settings on the table cells (in text mode) can be a laborious task.
Using Headings
Headings should be added to text using the drop-down menu on the second row of buttons in the visual editor. Headings should be level 3 or 4 (Level 1 is the site title, Level 2 is the page/post title). Using headings of level 5 and 6 should be avoided if possible.
Linking to pages
When linking to pages, ensure that the linked text makes sense if it is read independently. In other words, linking from the words “click here” or “download” does not make sense when taken out of context (which is what screen reading software does) – consider linking entire sentences or phrases, like “Download the conference programme”.
Links can be added to the page text by selecting the text you want to form the link, then clicking on the Insert Link button. A dialog will appear where you can paste in a URL, add a title (which forms the “tooltip” when the link is hovered over by a mouse), or select an existing page on the site. To remove links from text, place the cursor in the linked text and click on the Remove Link button.
Page URLs
When you add a new page, the URL for the page appears underneath the title. This consists of the title with all spaces and special characters removed (spaces are replaced by hyphens). While this is OK for most pages, pages with longer titles make very long URLs, so consider shortening these (click on the edit button next to the URL). Make sure you keep any relevant keywords in the URL, but remove anything else (keeping the hyphens intact between words).
Special Characters and non-english languages
Inserting accented or other special characters is achieved using the Character Map plugin in the editor (omega Ω symbol). If you are inserting long passages of text in a non-english language, you should add the correct language code to the text (see a list of language codes here). This is done by adding an attribute to the containing HTML element – you will need to switch from “Visual” mode to “Text” mode in the editor using the tabs on the top right of the editor to do this. If the text is in a paragraph or quote, wrap it in <p lang="br">[…]</p> tags or <blockquote lang="br">[…]</blockquote> tags respectively. If the text consists of a number of paragraphs, wrap them all in <div lang="br">[…]</div> tags (this example assumes the language is Breton).