Custom HTML markup in your topics

Of course you can also add custom markup into your topic content. Because Help Builder eventually renders to HTML it makes sense that you should be able to embed HTML into your topic content as well.

Help Builder uses a special format of HTML that we call Formatted HTML in its content fields. This formatted HTML uses double chevrons ( <<tag>> ), rather than single chevrons ( <tag> ) for embedding HTML into your document.

Why, you might ask? Well, when you enter text into Help Builder you're entering content NOT HTML. If we provided only HTML input a lot of text would have to be created. So, rather we assume the text you type is content and you want all text to be converted into HTML. This means when you type something like like this:

<smile>

we assume you actually want to display <smile> in your help text and not have the help file interpret the text as HTML. So, when you type you can type anything you want and Help Builder will take care of the conversion into proper HTML - linebreaks are automatically added and all text is automatically encoded.

But what if I really want to embed some HTML into my content?

We allow you to do that by using one of two ways:

Using double chevron syntax for tags
Using double chevrons for markup tags allows Help Builder to differentiate between text containing tags that you might want to display in your document (for example if you want to display some HTML or XML in code samples) and actual markup. This is how Help Builder injects tags from the HTML edit toolbar for example. This also applies to script tags that you want to inject into your topic text.
Examples:
```
I want some <<bold>> text in my doc.
Link me to <<%= TopicLink([another topic],[_123456789])%>>
```
Using <RAWHTML></RAWHTML> blocks
If you have a bunch of HTML that you want to embed into a topic field you can simply cut and paste the HTML into Help Builder and wrap the block into a <RAWHTML></RAWHTML> block. Using this block tells Help Builder to not format the text inside of it and embed it - as is - into the HTML output content for the topic. There can be more than one block and blocks can either be embedded into the middle of the document or make up the entire document.
Example:
```
This is some topic field text...

<RAWHTML>
<table border=1>
<tr><td>Hello World</td></tr>
</table>
</RAWHTML>

Some more plain <<bold>> text.
```

Embedding double chevrons

Note that if you really have to embed double chevrons into the document you will have to format them specially either with an extra space like so: < < > > or by encoding them with (minus the spaces):

& lt;< tag >& gt;