## Semantic Text Editing

When doing classic editing, you give text a look and this is to represent a specific meaning. In contrast, with Semantic editing you can give your text a meaning and therefore it inherits a specific look. Please note the difference here: in Semantic editing, the meaning of a text is the only importance, not its appearance. For instance, you might have always made your comments italic. But is an italic text always a comment? The other way around this is very clear: when a text is a comment, you want to see it in italic. Using this way it is not only possible to have different looks in different views for the same semantic, it is also possible to change the look without any changes to the text.

To use those features of Semantic text editing, Ulysses serves you with Paragraph styles, Inline styles and Markers.
Paragraph styles are used for changing the meaning, and therefore the look, of a whole paragraph. In the example from above, you might want to assign every comment to the same Paragraph style, which is only used for comments. You can set the look of the style in the Preferences. For instance, it could look gray and italic. In the various Exporters you can also decide on how to handle the different Paragraph styles (see the Exporter documentation for details). Exporters can remove your comments in the exported documents, because they are not part of your final work but just comments.
Whereas Paragraph styles always correspond to a whole paragraph, Inline styles only correspond to a smaller text passage enclosed in two tags. For example, if you want to emphasize a phrase in the text, you can simply enclose it in two tags, which are used for highlighting text. Just like the Paragraph styles, you can set how Inline styles should be displayed and how they should appear in the exported documents.
The third kind, Markers, are quite similar to Inline styles. Think about markers as these huge yellow text markers you use when reviewing a printed text. With them, you can select part of the text and give it a marking. For example, you can create a marker that highlights text passages needing rework. The only difference here is that you can change the text color as well. Again, you can simply change the look in the Preferences.

Pros: No more fiddling around with formattings. Concentration on the content instead of the look.

< Two Editing Levels
PlugIn-based Export >