The HTML-kit editor

This shows an auction template opened with the HTML-kit editor. The text and HTML code is edited in this view.

At the top of the editor are the Main Menu and Tool Bars. These can be repositioned by dragging. All commands can be accessed from the Main Menu.

Shown below these in the screenshot is the Action Bar. This allows quick access to the editing tools and can be opened from View | Action Bar. Near the bottom of the editor, not shown in the screenshot, is the Message Window. This can be dragged from the bottom and closed.

Note; before editing an html document always make a backup copy of it, just in case of mistakes.

Find/replace functions

Much used tools are the find and replace functions. These can be opened from the edit menu or by using the short cut keys Ctrl-F and Ctrl-H respectively.
The find function can be used for finding single or multiple occurrences of objects in the whole document or in a selected highlighted area.

The replace function works in a similar way but replaces the object text/HTML with the new text/HTML. The screenshot below shows the replace window with some HTML to be replaced. To the right of input fields are buttons which allow for multi-line replacement. The Direction and Scope boxes determine the area to be searched.

This is the HTML-kit editor in the preview mode and shows an auction template before the auction description and photo's have been added. This is preview only, there is no editing available in this mode.

This shows the HTML-kit editor with the attribute menu open. The attribute menu in the HTML-kit editor is accessed by placing the cursor before the > sign in a start tag and then pressing the space bar. Wait a second and a menu will appear which contains all the attribute options for that HTML tag.

A new HTML document can be created from the File menu, by clicking the doc icon in the tool bar or by using Ctrl-Alt-N. The screenshot shows just such a new document. Note that it includes the HTML tags required for a web page, these are not needed for an Ebay listing and should be deleted to create a blank page.

The new HTML document can be used to create an Ebay template by copying the HTML from templates found in the Custom Design pages and Templates pages. These templates can then be edited as needed.

Another use for a new document is to create auction listing text which can then be pasted into a template. The text will appear as a continuous block with no formatting, formatting is done by using HTML tags. The tags can be added before or after making the text. The completed text may be inserted in an auction template or into the custom design form, the text will inherit the colour and font type of the template design (dependent upon the template).

Some useful text tags;

  Start and end of a paragraph.
  Starts a new line of text. (Shortcut keys Ctrl-Enter)
  Used for styling parts of text.

Example of tag use;

Curabitur dictum,  dolor sodales iaculis eleifend, dui lacus pulvinar sapien, sit amet tristique purus ante sit amet quam. Fusce vulputate rutrum lectus. Maecenas eget erat elit. Vestibulum dictum odio a lorem luctus sagittis. 
Nullam rutrum hendrerit tellus, malesuada dapibus eros pharetra at. Suspendisse pulvinar diam nec metus vehicula luctus.

There is an HTML-Tidy function which will check the HTML for errors.
This is invoked from Actions | Tools | HTML Tidy | [Invoke HTML Tidy]. A message box lists all the errors in the coding. The HTML-kit editor is designed to edit web pages and so checks the document header codes, these can be ignored for an Ebay template. The screenshot shows the Message Window with three messages all relating to a web document.

The error message list includes the line number and an icon on the left. A serious error will have a red icon and needs to be corrected first. The HTML-Tidy also generates the corrected code on the right-hand side of a split screen. This can be used to correct all the errors by right-clicking on it then select Copy Output to Editor, normally it is best to correct the faults manually.

Return to HTML