Alternatives to HTML and the Visual Editor

For most purposes, the Kupu visual editor will be the best choice available for editing body text. However, the visual editor may be unavailable if you're using an unsupported browser (at the time of this writing, only Firefox and Internet Explorer 6 are supported) or have JavaScript disabled. You may also simply wish to avoid using the visual editor if you're working with a slow bandwidth connection, as the components of the visual editor can take a long time to download.

If the visual editor is unavailable, the body portion of a content item's edit form will appear as a simple text box, without Kupu's styling buttons.

If that's the case, you should look to the Text Format drop-down selection field. The choice you make here will determine how the body copy you enter will be interpreted when the site is displayed. Different choices are associated with different presentation rules.

Text Format Options

There are four text format choices:

HTML

HyperText Markup Language. Choose this if you wish to insert raw HTML code.
Note that whatever code you insert will be placed in a page with an XHTML 1.0 Transitional document type and substantial CSS. Best results will come from keeping your markup light and semantic. Use major tags according to their semantic meaning (H[1-5] for headlines, P for paragraphs, strong and em for bold and italic).
When you save your page, your code is run through a verification to make sure that nothing you've entered is invalid HTML (for example, unclosed or obsolete tags). 

Plain Text

As simple as it sounds. The only markup recognized by the plain text interpreter is end-of-paragraph codes (where you press enter). Multiple spaces are collapsed into one. The text is presented in the default paragraph font.

Structured Text

Structured Text (also known as StructuredText or STX) is a simple text markup scheme that provides a quick, easy way to do light formatting of text without resorting to HTML.
Structured Text interprets empty lines as paragraph breaks. Indentation in the source text is used to indicate document structure. Text inside double asterisks, e.g., **bold** is interpreted as bold; single asterisks are used for italics. 
See Plone.org how-to on using Structured Text markup or the Plone Structured Text How To for details.

reStructured Text

reStructured Text (also known as ReST or RestructuredText) is a much richer and more consistent plain text markup system than Structured Text, which it was invented to replace. Its rule set is complete enough to handle long articles, but it's also a bit harder to learn than Structured Text.
See the DocUtils site for details.

Switching Back to the Visual Editor

If you've created a document using a text format other than HTML, that's the way you'll need to edit in the future. So, when you edit the content item again, even if Kupu is available, you'll see the standard text area edit field rather than the visual editor.

You may, however, convert the body to HTML and edit it in Kupu by clicking on the "edit with kupu" link at the bottom of the body text field.

If you're going to exercise the "edit with kupu" option, make this your first editing action. If you try it after making changes, you may lose the changes.