Feature Guide to the Advanced Editor

World Anvil has two main text editors: the Visual Editor, which is simple and streamlined, and the Advanced Editor ("Euclid"), which lets advanced users use BBCode on their articles to create more complex layouts and styles. If you're a new user, we recommend using the Visual Editor (check the guide here otherwise, keep reading to know how to use Euclid!

Editor interface overview

Here's what the Advanced Editor editor looks like while editing an article:

As you can see, the content of the article includes all the BBCode tags instead of showing you how it will look. The syntax highlighting (i.e. the colored text) lets you quickly tell the BBCode tags and the regular text apart. But the editor interface itself is very simple: a text box with a toolbar you can use to insert formatting tags.

How to use your browser's spellchecker

Due to how the Advanced Editor is built, your browser's spellcheck can't "see" the contents of the editor. To use spellcheck on Euclid:

1. Click the "Spellcheck" button on the editor toolbar. This will transform the text box into a plain text box (i.e. it will keep the same text but Euclid will be disabled).
2. Wait for the spellchecker to highlight typos in your article. You might need to click or type something in the text field in order for the spellchecker to react.
3. Once you've fixed all typos, click the "Spellcheck" button again (it will be at the bottom of the text box).

A future update to the editor will make it compatible with your browser's spellchecker.

Keyboard shortcuts

Some BBCode tags have keyboard shortcuts:

• Ctrl+B: bold text ([b]...[/b])
• Ctrl+I: italic text ([i]...[/i])
• Ctrl+U: underlined text ([u]...[/u])
• Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3, Ctrl+4: headers ([h1]...[/h1], etc.)
• Ctrl+P: paragraph ([p]...[/p])
• Ctrl+Shift+C, Ctrl+Shift+S: custom container and section ([container:]...[/container], [section:]...[/section]). Read more about containers.
• Ctrl+Enter: line break ([br])

Check the guide to BBCode to see all BBCode options available.

Other features

Here's a couple of quick tips & tricks for Euclid:

• Press Ctrl+F to open the search bar on Euclid. The search bar supports regular expression syntax if you wrap the search term between forward slashes (for example, /colou?r/ will match both "color" and "colour", and /\[b].+\[\/b\]/ will highlight all bold text).
• The Autolink button in the toolbar will help you automatically find words in the article that could be links to other articles. Euclid'd autolinker lets you fine-tune more how these links look. Learn more in the guide to the autolinker.