Help Builder allows you to edit the body content of your topic visually using a rich HTML Edit control. To enter this mode click on the Internet Explorer Icon on the right side of the content editor just above the big body field.

Note:
Once you edit a topic visually, you cannot to go back to 'formatted text' view that Help Builder uses normally. Once the topic has been visually edited the content becomes pure HTML and can be edited only using either the visual HTML editor or as pure HTML text.

Visual editing is supported only for the body field as it's typically the primary field used for entering stylized topic information either for class or code documentation, or as the only input field for pure end user documentation. The image below demonstrates this feature in action allowing you to edit the body text for the topic in place in full WYSIWYG mode.

In this mode you can simply edit text and see immediately what it looks like. Help Builder injects your text into the default templates header, so you see the text formatted with the proper style information.

Although Help Builder cannot return to the default 'formatted' text format you can always view the underlying HTML of the body field by unchecking the HTML Edit button above the body field. HTML view is plain HTML view, so you see all markup. Help Builder will try to highlight the HTML text matching the last selection point in the HTML view to make finding your place easy.

Edit Toolbar Interaction

While in HTML Edit mode Help Builder's Menu operation is slightly different due to the interaction of the edit control

with Help Builder's UI. This integration is not quite as seamless as for standard editing, and specifically most of the hotkeys for the toolbar and edit menu options will not work from within the HTML Editor. The Word spell checking also can not be performed in visual mode - to spell check you have to drop into HTML Source view and then check against the HTML document.

Custom ShortCut Menus

The HTML Edit view also provides a number of shortcut menus that are different from the standard edit menu that pops up in text mode. These shortcuts deal with object selections and unique issues for editing text inside of the HTML editor.

Table Editing
While inside of Help Builder you can create tables with the Table Editing Toolbar option. Once the table is in the document you can manipulate it through the shortcut menu:

Inside of a cell you can use the ShortCut menu to insert and delete rows as well as bring up the Table configuration dialog that allows you to configure a specific cell or the table as a whole:

You can also tab through cells and if you tab out of the last cell Help Builder automatically inserts a new row with the same formatting as the previous cell.

HyperLinks
Hyperlinks and bookmarks can be embedded into the document using the standard Help Builder Toolbar. The links get directly embedded into the visual content. To edit an existing link, right click and select 'Edit Hyperlink'. If the link is a hyper link the standard hyperlink dialog pops up, if it's link to another topic the Topic Bookmark Link dialog pops up.

Pasting into the document
The HTML Edit control is basically a rich edit control and it can accept many types of input directly via drag and drop or pasting. For example, in many cases you can cut and paste text of a Web page directly off a Web page and paste it into the visual Edit form maintaining the formatting.

There are 3 Paste modes available from the Shortcut menu:

• Paste
  This is the default paste operation. This converts incoming text to HTML and tries to maintain the formatting.

• Paste Code or Formatted Text
  Use this option to paste code or HTML/XML that you want to display as text. This brings up the formatted code dialog used in the non-visual editor. Note that this option picks up the code as text and then formats it using the built in parsers.

• Paste and maintain Formatting
  This option takes the incoming clipboard data as text and tries to maintain the formatting by HTML Encoding the content. This works best for text that is not code or other 'formatted text' but still contains special spacing and indentations.
  

Text Operations
There are a also a few text operations that are useful. You can unformat a block of text which will remove the outermost HTML tag of the selected text. Note that this behavior may vary depending on which type of element your text is sitting in.

Ctrl-Z works to undo changes. To Redo use the text shortcut menu.