Element banner text

Introduction

Banner text in a document acts as a visual cue to working with the element in a document. For example, the following document based on the DITA topic Structured Application, displays banner text:

Figure 1. Banner text indicates what you should enter in various elements

When you place the cursor on the banner text, the entire text is selected, you can then start typing and the banner text is replaced.

Show or hide element banner text

You can choose to display or hide the banner text in a document. By default, the banner text is displayed.

To show or hide the banner text, choose View > Element Banner Text.

Remove element banner text on delete

If you select the banner text in an element and press the Del key, the banner text is removed. However, if you do not type any text in place of the banner text, as soon as you move to another element, the deleted banner text is displayed in the element.

You can choose to override this default behavior and ensure that the banner text, if deleted, does not reappear. The banner text will not reappear even if you close and reopen the document.

To ensure that the banner text remains deleted, you need to set the RedisplayBannerTextForemptyElements flag in the maker.ini file to OFF.

Element banner text settings

Besides the RedisplayBannerTextForemptyElements flag described above, you can also configure banner text using the following settings in the maker.ini file: