Editing Text

If you have ever had to interact with a text field pertaining to a CoB data entity - either an instance or a definition -, you may have noticed that, whenever you click on the editor's toolbar in order to format the highlighted text in a particular way, the text editor inserts certain special characters to before and after the text you want to format.

For instance, if you want to underline the importance of a given phrase, you can click on the button on the editor's toolbar to format the selection in bold. This will automatically insert two asterisks before and after - i.e, **this text is very important**. If you want to emphasize it, you can click on the button on the editor's toolbar to format the selection in italic, the editor will place a single asterisk before and after - i.e., *this text is emphasized*. To create an heading from a paragraph, click on the button and the editor will place a number sign before it - i.e., # Title.

What the editor does is it inserts these special characters which have a particular meaning. These are Markdown formatting elements. Markdown is a lightweight markup language that can be used to format text documents. It was created in 2004 by the software developer John Gruber. Being also a markup language, Markdown is very similar to the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) that is used in all web pages to communicate words, images, sound and video. Markdown is, however, much easier to write and to read. And since the Cob platform text editor already creates all the markdown for you - meaning, you only need to learn what type of text formatting each of the toolbar buttons does -, there is no need for you to learn every Markdown syntax element.

Here is a small video with an example of the CoB's platform text editor in action:

In any case, we include in the references a cheat sheet containing a list of essential Markdown syntax elements.