What is the Format Stripper?
The Format Stripper is a drop-down menu in the Page Body Content editor. It can be found on the third row down on the edit toolbar, just right of the Paragraph Style drop-down menu. It is denoted by a brush over a document, as per figure 1.
Figure 1.
Why use it?
When copying content such as text from Microsoft Word, not only is the content copied, so too is the formatting. This can cause unexpected formatting issues when pasted into the editor. This may not be immediately apparent, especially if you’re just copying over text, but it can cause issues later on when inserting content such as images or tables into your Page Body Content.
As you can see from figure 2, if you place a tick in the HTML Mode checkbox*, there is a lot of text pasted from Microsoft Word aside from the actual intended content – this is the formatting copied and pasted with the text.
When you save the page, the automatic format stripper built into the Cubik system should remove much of the extraneous formatting, but sometimes some is left behind. In this instance, rather than sifting through the HTML and manually removing extraneous formatting, it is highly recommended that you choose to use the Format Stripper.
Figure 2.
Using the Format Stripper is relatively simple. Referring to figure 3, if you click on the Format Stripper drop-down menu, you will be presented by a number of options; the second of which will allow you to clear your content of any formatting copied from Microsoft Word. Once you have done this, you can validate this by placing a tick in the HTML Mode checkbox*. If you compare figure 2 and figure 4, you can clearly see that the formatting has since been removed.
Figure 3.
What about the rest of the formatting?
If you refer once again to figure 4, you may notice that there is code that suggests further formatting, which appears to be dictating font colour, size and typeface. Your site’s styling should override this and remove them the next time you save the page. However, for peace of mind, you can also use the Font Tags option to remove these.
Sometimes, you may also notice the presence of <SPAN> tags when in HTML Mode. These too can cause formatting issues that will impact on the way your content is presented. These are not needed and can simply be removed by choosing the Span Tags option. Again, validate the change has taken place by placing a tick in the HTML Mode checkbox.
Figure 4.
Should you still be experiencing issues with formatting after using the Format Stripper, please don’t hesitate to contact Cubik Support and we’ll be happy to investigate further on your behalf.
* A note to users of Internet Explorer 8: in order that you can enable HTML Mode, you must first ensure you have Compatibility Mode enabled in your browser. This can be achieved by navigating to Tools > Compatibility Mode from the browser toolbar. You will be asked to refresh the page – you can go ahead and do this, so press OK.
