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Articles / .NET

Formatting your CodeProject Article

4.79/5 (12 votes)
22 May 2010CPOL1 min read 20.1K  
Bad formatting will delay the approval of your articles. Follow these basic rules to avoid that delay.

Having trouble writing or posting articles? These articles aim to gather together tips and tricks from authors and mentors to help you write great articles.

One of the most pervasive problems we face here at CodeProject is an inability to properly format articles. I think the most probable cause for this is that article authors use Microsoft Word or some other program to edit their article text, convert it to HTML, and then paste that HTML into the article editor in the Article Submission Wizard.

My tip is DON'T DO THAT.

I write my article in Visual Studio, and lately, I've been actually adding the article text as a .HTM file in the solution.

The key is to not get any fancier than you have to. The vast majority of articles require no special formatting in order to present themselves in a manner that adheres to the standard CodeProject appearance. You don't need to add colors, or spacing, or any of that other stuff., and you generally don't need any tags beyond the folllowing standard tags:

<H2> or <H3> for headers

<pre> for blocks of code

<code> for references to coding elements, such as class names

<b> and <i> for emphasis on text

<ul> and <li> for bullet lists

There is generally no need for anything fancier.

Finally, PLEASE proofread your articles to make sure they look okay. A poorly formatted article will delay the process where it is made available to other users.

EDIT ========

Fixed some spelling errors.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)