Anchors

Two types of anchor are supported by HTML Author. These are HREF anchors and NAME anchors, and correspond to the HTML "<A HREF=..." and "<A NAME=..." anchors respectively. Anchors are held in the source document as fields (a feature of Word for Windows). You may see what these fields look like "in the flesh" by clicking the View Field Codes button and the Show/Hide button (the fields contain some hidden text) in the toolbar. (These are both Word for Windows buttons.) You should refrain from editing the fields directly in this mode unless you really know what you are doing.

Creating Anchors

Anchors may be created either by selecting "Create HREF" or "Create NAME" entries from the "HTML Author" menu, or clicking on the corresponding buttons from the toolbar. If you wish to use some existing text as the text of the anchor, then you should select the required text in the document first (standard Microsoft Word for Windows select operation). You will then see a dialogue box with two fields labelled NAME (or HREF) and TEXT:

The text typed into these fields will be used to create the HTML anchor as follows:

<A HREF="NAME">TEXT</A>

The NAME field is the URL or local filename for the target in an HREF anchor, or is the target name in a NAME anchor. The TEXT field is the text that should appear on the screen in the document.

"HREF" anchors will appear in blue text underlined text in your source document, just like they do in Netscape. "NAME" anchors do not have a special text format in Netscape, so they are indicated by a dotted underline in your source document.

Once you are happy with the Name and Text fields, click the Insert button and your anchor field will be inserted in the document.

Note: The length of the anchor text must not cover more than one line of text on the Word for Windows editing screen. This is a limitation of Word for Windows fields. If you do specify anchor text covering more than one line, Word for Windows will display the error message: "DisplayText cannot span more than one line!" in place of the anchor text. If you see this message, you should select the field by clicking on the error message, then bring up the Anchors dialogue box by pressing Alt+Shift+F9. You can then either remove the field - leaving the text in the document - or edit the text to make it shorter.