The rich-text editor

Where to find it

Anywhere you write formatted content — email templates, SMS templates, job descriptions, email signature

Who can use it

Anyone allowed to edit the content in question

The rich-text editor is the writing area you meet on several Nextal screens. It is the same editor everywhere: what you learn here applies equally to an email template and to a job description.

This page describes the editor itself. The permissions you need depend on the screen you are on — see Email templates, SMS templates, Job description authoring, or Email configuration and signature.

The toolbar

Left to right:

Control	What it does
Size	Two values: Normal and Small. Use Small for legal notices and footnotes.
Style	Paragraph, Heading 1 through Heading 4. Use headings to structure a long message; they survive sending.
Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough	The basics.
Text colour, Highlight colour	A palette of shades, plus Automatic (text colour) and None (highlight) to undo.
Numbered list, Bulleted list	Turn the selected lines into a list.
Increase indent, Decrease indent	These are for nesting lists only. Outside a list both buttons are disabled — a paragraph indent would not survive being emailed, so the editor does not pretend to offer one.
Align left, Centre, Align right, Justify	Alignment of the paragraph the cursor is in.
$	Inserts a variable. See Inserting a variable. The button appears only on screens that offer variables.
@	Mentions someone in your organization. See Mentioning a colleague.
Insert link	Opens a small panel for the address. Accepts web addresses, mailto: and tel:. A link typed without https:// is completed for you.
Insert button	Adds a call-to-action button. See Call-to-action buttons.
Clear formatting	Strips formatting from the selection and keeps the text.
</>	Switches to the HTML code. See Editing the HTML.

The toolbar is a single tab stop: press Tab to reach it, then use the left and right arrow keys to move between buttons, Home and End for the first and last. Tab again takes you into the text.

Note

Some screens show only part of these controls, and a read-only field shows no toolbar at all. The $ and @ buttons in particular appear only where the screen supplies a list of variables or a list of users.

Inserting a variable

A variable is a placeholder that Nextal replaces with the real value when the message is sent. You write the template once; every recipient gets a message that talks about them.

What you write in the template	What the candidate receives
Hello $candidate.firstName,	Hello Marie,
Your application for $job.title	Your application for Business Analyst
Your interview is scheduled for $interview.startDateEn	Your interview is scheduled for September 12, 2026

The two ways to insert one

1. The $ button in the toolbar. Put the cursor where the variable belongs and click $. The list opens.

2. Type $ straight into the text. This is the shortcut. The moment you type the $ character, the same list appears under the cursor. Keep typing to filter: $cand narrows it to the candidate variables.

Choosing from the list

Variables are grouped by subject — Candidate, Candidate account, Job, Interview, Interviewer, Writer, User, Contact, Date, Survey, Feedback. The group headings are there to help you find things; they cannot be selected.

• Up and down arrows to move, Enter to insert, Escape to close without inserting.
• Or just click the row you want.
• Some variables carry a URL badge: those are the ones that produce a link. They are the only ones that make sense as the destination of a call-to-action button.

Once inserted, the variable becomes a coloured chip in the text. It is a single block: one Backspace deletes the whole thing, you never have to erase it character by character.

What to know

Note

A $ that is not a known variable stays ordinary text. You can write Salary: $78,000 or $50,000 to $60,000 with no special care — the editor only turns a token into a chip when it is on the list.

• A variable typed by hand works too. If you close the list and finish typing $candidate.firstName yourself, it stays plain text on screen, but it is stored exactly the same way and it will be replaced when the message is sent. It becomes a chip the next time you open the template.
• Pick a variable that makes sense in the message. An Interview variable in an email that has nothing to do with an interview has no value to draw on, and will not be replaced.
• The list depends on the screen. A screen that offers no variables shows no $ button and does not react to the $ character.

Mentioning a colleague

The @ button — or the @ character typed straight into the text — opens the list of users in your organization. Search by first name, last name, or email address, then pick the person. Their name is inserted as a chip, exactly like a variable, and one Backspace removes it.

The search matches on a single word: type mar or marie.tremblay@ rather than Marie Tremblay.

Note

A mention puts the person’s name in the text — it does not notify them. In the body of an email template it is simply a quick way to spell a colleague’s name correctly. Do not rely on it to alert anyone.

Call-to-action buttons

A call-to-action button is the coloured, clickable rectangle at the bottom of most emails Nextal sends — View the offer, Confirm my attendance, Answer the survey. The system templates already contain one.

To insert one: put the cursor on the line you want and click Insert button. A blue button labelled View the offer appears on its own line.

To edit one: click it. A small panel opens with four controls.

• Button label — the visible text. Keep it short and imperative: Confirm my attendance reads better than Click here to confirm your attendance.
• Destination — where the button goes. Two modes, see below.
• Button colour — six shades. The first, Classic blue, is the colour used by the templates Nextal ships with; it is there so you can always get back to where you started after experimenting. The button’s border follows the colour you pick.
• Remove button — deletes the button and its line.

There is no Apply button: every change takes effect immediately. Escape closes the panel, and clicking elsewhere in the text closes it too.

The destination is nearly always a variable

This is the part that matters. A View my application button must not point at a fixed address — it has to take each recipient to their own record. That is exactly what a link variable does.

So the Destination field has two modes:

• Merge variable — a dropdown limited to the variables that produce a link ($candidate.url, $job.url, $surveyURL, $interview.visioConferenceURL, $interviewSlotUrl, and so on). This is the mode to use in a template. Out of 48 variables only 7 produce a link; the dropdown shows only those, so you cannot pick one that is not a link by mistake.
• Web address — a fixed address, for the rare case where the button always goes to the same place (your career page, an internal policy).

Switching modes clears the field: there is only one destination, and the editor does not keep a hidden draft of the other mode.

Note

If you enter a destination that does not look like a web address, the editor warns without blocking and keeps the value. That is deliberate — some of the templates Nextal ships with use an address with a variable embedded in the middle of it, which is perfectly valid even though it does not start with https://.

Editing the HTML

The </> button replaces the writing area with the HTML behind your content, laid out so it can be read. It is a tool for people comfortable with HTML — pasting a block supplied by a vendor, fixing a markup detail the toolbar cannot reach.

While the code is showing, the rest of the toolbar is greyed out: bold and alignment mean nothing against code. Only the </> button stays active, because it is the way back.

Opening the HTML view and leaving it without changing anything changes nothing at all. No reformatting, no stray save.

The warning on the way back

When you switch back to visual editing, the editor checks that it can reproduce your HTML exactly. If it cannot, it stops you and says why:

Some content would be lost. The editor cannot keep these elements: img, table. They will be removed if you continue.

You then choose between Continue anyway — the named elements disappear — and Cancel, which returns you to the code untouched.

There is a second message, with no list of elements:

Switching back would rewrite this HTML.

It appears when nothing would be deleted, but the editor would express the markup differently from the way you wrote it. The result would look identical; the code would not. It is your call whether that is acceptable.

Note

On some fields the warning refuses the switch instead of offering to continue. A message under the code then names the elements to remove. Your HTML is never changed behind your back: either way, what you wrote is what is saved.

Fields that stay in HTML mode

Some fields — the email signature above all — accept HTML the visual editor cannot reproduce, typically a corporate signature with a logo and a layout table.

When you open content like that, the field opens straight into HTML mode, with:

• a banner naming the elements involved and reminding you that your content is stored exactly as written, character for character;
• a Preview under the code showing the real rendering;
• an Edit visually button, which becomes usable if you simplify the content to the point where the editor can reproduce it.

This is a safeguard, not a limitation: a signature pasted from Outlook is never damaged by passing through Nextal.

Pasting from Word

Pasting from Word, Outlook, or Google Docs works, and Nextal cleans up automatically — the HTML Word produces is full of invisible layout instructions that mean nothing in an email.

What is kept

The text, the paragraphs, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, text colour, highlighting, alignment, and links.

What is not

• Images are removed. A notice tells you how many. This is not an accident: the editor does not store images, and an image pasted from Word points at a file on your own computer (file:///C:/…) that nobody else can see anyway. For an image in an email, use a hosted image address from the HTML view.
• Tables are flattened. All the text is kept, but the grid is gone: each cell becomes its own paragraph, in reading order. A notice tells you how many tables were processed. If the table layout matters, rebuild it in the HTML view.

Word’s lists stay as text

This is the most common surprise, so it is worth saying plainly: bulleted and numbered lists made in Word are not rebuilt as real lists. Word’s markers — ·, o, § — and the numbers arrive as ordinary text at the start of each line.

They are left there on purpose: removing them without rebuilding the list would delete information and leave unexplained gaps.

To get real lists: select the lines, click Bulleted list or Numbered list, then delete the now-redundant markers. It takes a few seconds and the result renders correctly in every email client.

Note

The clean-up described here applies only to content coming from Office. A table copied from a web page is not flattened tidily: its text is kept but the cells end up run together. Use the HTML view if the result is not what you expected.

Tips

• Check how your variables render before you activate a template. A badly chosen variable does not raise an error — it produces an odd email for the recipient.
• One link variable per button. A button whose destination points somewhere other than the record in question is the kind of defect you find out about from a candidate’s phone call.
• Write first, format second. Formatting applied while typing often carries into the next paragraph without your meaning it to.
• Keep it plain. Email clients — Outlook especially — ignore a good deal of CSS. Bold, lists, links, and buttons work everywhere; elaborate layouts do not.