Editing Content in Author Mode

The Author mode includes a large variety of user-friendly authoring features to help you work with XML content, including numerous toolbar, menu, and shortcut actions and some specialized content editing features.

Undo/Redo Actions

The typical undo and redo actions are available with shortcuts or in the Edit menu:

Undo (Ctrl + Z (Command + Z on macOS)): Reverses a maximum of 200 editing actions to return to the preceding state.
Note: Complex operations such as Replace All or Indent selection count as single undo events.
Redo (Ctrl + Y (Command + Shift + Z on macOS, Ctrl + Shift + Z on Linux/Unix)): Recreates a maximum of 100 editing actions that were undone by the Undo function.

Copy and Paste Actions

The typical copying and pasting actions are available with shortcuts or in the contextual menu (or the Edit menu):

Cut (Ctrl + X (Command + X on macOS))

Removes the currently selected content from the document and places it in the clipboard.

Copy (Ctrl + C (Command + C on macOS))

Places a copy of the currently selected content in the clipboard.

The clipboard contains the precise node structure that is preserved when pasting to another place within the same document or to another document opened in the Author mode. The copied content also contains a plain Text flavor that attempts to convert the copied content to Markdown when the content gets pasted into a plain text area and also an HTML flavor that attempts to convert the copied structure to plain HTML, which can be useful for preserving the styles when pasting into editors such as MS Word.

Paste (Ctrl + V (Command + V on macOS))

Inserts the current clipboard content into the document at the cursor position.

Select All (Ctrl + A (Command + A on macOS))

Selects the entire content of the current document.

Entering Text in Elements

By default, you can only enter text in elements that accept text content. If the element is declared as empty or element only in the associated schema, you are not allowed to insert text in it. Instead, a warning message is displayed.

Figure 1. Editing in empty element warning

To allow text to be inserted in these instances, go to the Schema-Aware preferences page and deselect the Reject action when its result is invalid option in the Typing actions section.

Editing Text Content Without Modifying the XML Markup

You can use the options in the Tags Display Mode drop-down menu (available on the toolbar) to control how tags are displayed in Author mode. This can help you to clearly see where the current cursor position is within the tag structure so that you can avoid making unintended modifications to the XML markup. You can also switch to the Grid editing mode to modify text content without affecting the XML tags.