Text formatting

In Rational Focal Point, special tags may be used in text attributes to format the text, e.g. rendering parts of the text in bold, italic or underlined. You can enter formatted text either by using these tags directly, or by using the built-in editor capabilities of text attributes. The editor can be enabled for text attributes using the Formatting option in the attribute settings.

All Focal Point text tags are surrounded by brackets: [ ]. Most of the tags require both a start and an end tag, but a few of them does not require an end tag. See table below for more details.

The way of formatting text is important when integrating with other applications. Depending on the application used to display the text, the Focal Point text tags may be translated to another markup language, e.g. HTML, or simply removed to display text without formatting. Of course, anything in between is also possible. Integrations that want to take advantage of text formatting in Focal Point text attributes need to be able to interpret the different formatting tags supported by Focal Point.

The following table contains all valid text tags, their meaning and if an end tag is required:
Tag Meaning End tag required
B Bold
I Italic
U Underlined
S Strike through
H1 Heading level 1
H2 Heading level 2
H3 Heading level 3
H4 Heading level 4
H5 Heading level 5
H6 Heading level 6
PRE Preformatted text
ADDRESS Address
STRONG Strong
OL Ordered list
UL Unordered list
LI List item
BLOCKQUOTE Block quote
URL Hyperlink
P Paragraph No
HR Horizontal rule No
Tags may be intermingled, and a tag starting inside another tag may end before or after the first tag ends.

The URL tag

The URL tag has an alternative format that differs from the other types of tags. While it can be used just like all other tags, the alternative format allows for adding a link title to be displayed instead of the link value itself. E.g. you may want to display a short title instead of a long, complicated HTTP link.
The normal URL tag looks like this:
[URL]http://www.ibm.com/[/URL]
The alternative format looks like this:
[URL=IBM]http://www.ibm.com/[/URL]

The alternative format in the example above would hint to the tool that renders the text that the link title IBM should be displayed instead of the link itself. If the tool that renders the text has no way of displaying a clickable link, it is recommended that the link is displayed instead of the title.

Some clients would just remove the tags and render the text without formatting, which is also OK. However, if the text is sent back and forth between Rational Focal Point and another tool, both tools must handle the tags in the same way for formatting information to be retained.


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