Editing Text

If you’ve ever interacted with a text field related to a CoB data entity—whether an instance or a definition—you may have noticed that when you click the editor’s toolbar to format selected text, the editor automatically inserts special characters before and after the text to apply the formatting.

Button	Description
	Formats the selected text in bold. The editor will automatically insert two asterisks before and after the selection — e.g., **this text is very important**.
	Formats the selected text in italic. The editor will insert a single asterisk before and after the selection — e.g., *this text is emphasized*.
	Converts a paragraph into a heading. The editor will place a number sign (#) before the line.

What the editor does is insert special characters that have a specific meaning — these are called Markdown formatting elements.

Markdown is a lightweight markup language used to format plain text. It was created in 2004 by software developer John Gruber. Since it's a markup language, Markdown is similar to HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which is used on all web pages to display text, images, audio, and video.

However, Markdown is much easier to write and read than HTML. And because the COB platform text editor automatically applies Markdown formatting for you — meaning you only need to understand what each toolbar button does — there's no need to learn the full Markdown syntax.

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 cheatsheet containing a list of essential Markdown syntax elements.