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Editing Articles

Opening an article — new, local, or downloaded from a site — takes you to the editor.

Title, alias and body

The Title field is at the top. Below it, the Alias field fills itself in from the title the first time you leave the title field, and the button beside it regenerates the alias from the current title on demand — it never overwrites an alias you have typed yourself unless you press that button.

The article body sits below, as a formatted editing surface: text you style is stored as HTML, and images you paste or drop are kept on this device until you publish. If you have a Markdown file you would rather start from, use Import Markdown… in the ⋯ menu, which converts it to HTML and asks before replacing whatever is already there.

Typing / in the body opens a menu of formatting commands — headings, lists, code, a quote, the read more separator, an image, a link, a table. Keep typing to narrow it down.

The read more separator

The dashed-line button on the formatting toolbar inserts a read more separator. Everything above it becomes the article's intro text — what a Joomla site shows in a category listing or on the front page — and everything below it is the rest of the article, shown once a reader opens it. An article can only have one, so the button tells you if there is already one in place.

Making room to write

The device's software keyboard takes up a large part of the screen, so three buttons in the navigation bar hand that space back:

  • Show or hide the title and alias collapses the two fields at the top once you have filled them in, which is usually the first thing you do and the last thing you look at.
  • Show or hide the formatting toolbar hides the editor's own toolbar entirely. It starts hidden every time you open an article — flick it on to apply a format, off again to keep writing.
  • Wrap the formatting toolbar switches it between scrolling sideways on a single row (the default, and the shortest) and wrapping onto as many rows as it needs so every button is visible at once.

None of the three is remembered between articles: every article opens the same way, with the title shown and the toolbar hidden and scrolling.

Editing the HTML directly

Some things are quicker — or only possible — in the markup itself: a class a template needs, an attribute the formatting toolbar has no button for, or a tag that has ended up in the wrong place. Tap the ⋯ button in the navigation bar and choose Edit HTML Source.

The source editor fills the screen, colours the markup so tags, attributes and comments are easy to tell apart, and adds a row of keys above the keyboard for the characters HTML is made of — <, >, /, =, " and the rest — so you are not hunting for them on the second and third keyboard layers. Autocorrect, automatic capitals and smart quotes are all switched off while you are in there: a curly quote inside an attribute looks right and does not work, so the editor never types one for you.

The editor can also finish tags for you: type <p> and </p> appears after the cursor, or type </ and it completes the nearest tag you have left open. How much of that it does is up to you — Settings → Grafida → Close HTML tags for me offers opening and closing tags, closing tags only, or neither.

Find (the magnifying glass, or ⌘F) searches the source and can replace one match at a time or all of them at once. Matching ignores case, so <DIV finds <div.

Done applies your text to the article exactly as you typed it — nothing is tidied, reformatted or corrected on the way out. Cancel throws the changes away, and asks first if you made any.

Save (or ⌘S) does what Done does and then saves the article, without closing the source editor — so you can work through a long stretch of markup the way you would anywhere else, saving as you go. What is written is exactly what is on screen. Once it has saved there is nothing left for Cancel to discard, so Cancel simply closes.

Note

Grafida keeps your markup as typed, but the visual editor underneath has to understand it to show it to you. Once you start typing in the visual editor again, the article's HTML is whatever that editor makes of what you wrote. If you have hand-written markup you want kept exactly, save it from the source editor — or publish — before going back to editing visually.

The inspector

The Inspector (a side panel, or a sheet on a narrower screen — tap the sidebar icon to show or hide it) holds everything about the article other than its text:

  • Site — which connected site this article belongs to. Changing it while the article is already linked to a published remote article asks first, since that link is what would be lost.
  • Status, Category, Access level, Language.
  • Tags — type a name and press Enter or comma to add it. A tag that does not exist yet on the site is created when you publish.
  • Custom Fields — whatever fields your site's category defines: text, numbers, dates, colours, dropdowns, checkboxes, and picture fields, each shown with its own matching control. A field type Grafida cannot display is still listed by name, so you know it exists even though you cannot edit it here.
  • Created by Alias, Meta Description, Meta Keywords.
  • Intro Image and Full Article Image — each with a preview, alt text, a caption, a CSS class, and two ways to set the picture itself: Choose file… picks from Photos or Files and stores it on this device until you publish; Browse… opens the site's own Media Manager to pick (or upload) an image there directly.

Save and Publish

Save writes the draft to this device. Publish saves first, then sends the article to the site — see Publishing for what that involves and what can stop it.

Leaving the editor with unsaved changes — the back button, switching screens, anything — always asks whether to save, discard, or keep editing first, however you tried to leave.

Moving an article between devices

Export…, in the ⋯ menu, saves the article as a .grafida file through the ordinary iOS share sheet — AirDrop it, save it to Files, whatever you'd do with any other file. See Drafts and Files for the other direction.