NVU to Create HTML Code to Insert into Websites
NVU is a free (as in GPL) Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) editor available at nvu.com.
You can use NVU is to generate bits of HTML code that you paste into a web form, like you do to update your profile, or to post an article. This can be done on any site that allows you to post in HTML.
Step by Step
1. Start up NVU.
2. Type in your text, adding any formatting you wish.
3. When you're ready to post, click on the "SOURCE" tab along the bottom of the editing area. You should see a screen with your text, surrounded and interspersed with text that looks like <this>. Those things are "HTML Tags".
Your goal is to extract some tags and text. To do this, first try to find the first <BODY> tag. It should be at around line 8 (the lines are numbered along the left edge of the editing area).
Then locate the closing (final) body tag, around one line before the end of the page. It should look like "</body>". The slash in front indicates it's a closing tag. (The other body tag was the opening tag.)
What you have to do is copy all the code between the body tags, but not including the body tags.
4. Most people click and drag to select the codes, then right-click and copy.
An alternative way is to click before the first character to select, then hold shift and click after the last character to select. Then, press control-C to copy.
5. Paste the code in your clipboard into the web form.
Images
The best way to incorporate images into your posts is to first, prepare your images, and upload them to a server. This can be an image server, or your own server, or an image-host. (On Indymedia sites, you can see if they let you upload images in a batch, then post the story afterward.)
By putting them on a server first, you are giving each image a permanent, public location. That location is the image's URL. Then, you can include that image in the HTML. That's how HTML works - images are references to the image files.
Please note that this is completely different from MS Word. In Word and other word processors, images are included into the document. The image data becomes part of the document, and the image is a copy of the original file. This is a subtle but important difference. Please unlearn any preconceptions you might have learned from MS Word. Also, don't use MS Word to create your HTML. NVU is a better tool.
So, let's assume you've put the images onto a server somewhere, and know the URLs.
To place the image in your document:
1. Click where you want the image to be, and click the Image icon in the toolbar.
2. Type in the URL to the image in the Location: field.
If you are lazy like me, you just open up the image in your browser, then copy the URL from the address bar, and paste it into the Location field.
3. Type in a description into the Alternative Text box, or click "Don't use alternate text."
4. Click OK.