Editing the XML Markup

One of the most useful feature in Author editor is the content completion support. The fastest way to invoke it is to press Enter or Ctrl Space (Command Space on OS X) in the editor panel.

Content completion window offers the following types of actions:

Inserting allowed elements for the current context according to the associated schema.
Inserting element values if such values are specified in the schema for the current context.
Inserting new undeclared elements by entering their name in the text field.
Inserting CDATA sections, comments, processing instructions.
Inserting code templates.
If the Show all possible elements in the content completion list option from the Schema aware preferences page is enabled, the content completion pop-up window will present all the elements defined by the schema. When choosing an element from this section, the insertion will be performed using the schema aware smart editing features.

Figure: Content completion window

If you press (Enter) the displayed content completion window will contain as first entries the Split <Element name> items. Usually you can only split the closest block element to the caret position but if it is inside a list item, the list item will also be proposed for split. Selecting Split <Element name> splits the content of the specified element around the caret position. Thus, if the caret is positioned at the beginning or at the end of the element, the newly created sibling will be empty.

If the caret is positioned inside a space preserve element the first choice in the content completion window is Enter which inserts a new line in the content of the element. If there is a selection in the editor and you invoke content completion, a Surround with operation can be performed. The tag used will be the selected item from the content completion window.

By default you are not allowed to insert element names which are not defined by the schema. This can be changed by unchecking the Allow only insertion of valid elements and attributes check box from the Schema aware preferences page.

Note: The content completion list of proposals contains elements depending on the elements inserted both before and after the caret position.

Joining two elements - You can choose to join the content of two sibling elements with the same name by using the contextual menu > Join elements action.

The same action can be triggered also in the next situations:

The caret is located before the end position of the first element and (Delete) key is pressed.
The caret is located after the end position of the first element and (Backspace) key is pressed.
The caret is located before the start position of the second element and (Delete) key is pressed.
The caret is located after the start position of the second element and (Backspace) key is pressed.

In either of the described cases, if the element has no sibling or the sibling element has a different name, Unwrap operation will be performed automatically.

Unwrapping the content of an element - You can unwrap the content of an element by deleting its tags using the Delete element tags action from the editor contextual menu.

The same action can be triggered in the next situations:

The caret is located before the start position of the element and (Delete) key is pressed.
The caret is located after the start position of the element and (Backspace) key is pressed.
The caret is located before the end position of the element and (Delete) key is pressed.
The caret is located after the end position of the element and (Backspace) key is pressed.

Removing all the markup of an element - You can remove the markup of the current element and keep only the text content by highlighting the appropriate block of content and use the Remove All Markup action that is available in the Refactoring submenu of the contextual menu and in the Document > Markup menu.

When you press (Delete) or (Backspace) in the presented cases the element is unwrapped or it is joined with its sibling. If the current element is empty, the element tags will be deleted.

When you click on a marker representing the start or end tag of an element, the entire element will be selected. The contextual menu displayed when you right-click on the marker representing the start or end tag of an element contains Append child, Insert Before and Insert After submenus as first entries.