I have a question that all four of the answer choices have to begin with a <... obviously recognized by HTML.  Example:  The answer needs to be <PAGE… I have input that answer as:  <;PAGE… but it is printing on the assessment as <PAGE. 

In most of my questions and answers that have these characters I’ve been successfully able to use ( for a hypen and &#lt; for the left caret, but neither seems to be doing the trick here.

Please advise.

That should have been “-” before the word hyphen above… not the left parenthesis…

Ugh… I hope you get the gist of the message… I can’t get the characters that I am inputting to show up because they are being interpretted… 

I hope that I am understanding your post above.  My concern is the forum is also messing with the characters you are looking to produce.

For a less-than sign, I typically use:  “&lt;” and for a greater-than use: “&gt;”.

You may also need less-than-or-equal-to, which is “&le;” and greater-than-or-equal-to, which is: “&ge;”.

A complete listing of these codes can be found here:
http://www.tntluoma.com/sidebars/codes/

Please see the question capture I have provided below.  It is still displaying the ampersand little L little T semi-colon instead of the left caret.  I’m obviously missing something!  This capture is from the “Print Assessment” option while editing an assessment.  I’m assuming since it is HTML output, what I see should be as the question will be seen during testing, right?

Hehe… okay I’m guessing you copied and pasted the examples I gave in my previous post.  Instead simply type “&lt;” in the answer field.  In other words, type ampersand, then “L”, then “T”, and finally semi-colon.  That should work.  If not, post a screenshot of your question editor page with the fields filled out.

In this forum post, I am using “&amp;” to create the ampersand, so that is no doubt causing the confusion.

That got it… finally… I knew I was missing something, or adding something, whatever! 

Thanks!!

Can I get text in questions and/or answers to be bolded, italicized, or underlined by using HTML tags before/after the text I want to display like that?  Is there another way?

Absolutely.  All assessment content text fields in Testcraft allow for most HTML code.  You can either type it manually or use the rich-text editor to enter it, where available.

Excellent—except I left out a vital fact, I guess.  I’m using the template to upload our questions.  I’m not an Excel guru… does Excel not like the HTML characters?  I tried to upload a question with a bolded word using and on either side of the word, and it did not import bolded.. What am I missing?  I really don’t want to have to edit each question manually in the rich text editor just to have bolding and italics if I don’t have to.

Are you previewing the question, or just looking in the question list (HTML is stripped when viewing the question list)?  It should work if you preview the question after an import or actually take the assessment.  If you are still having issues, please email me the file and I’ll check it out.

Amazing the results you get when you look in the right place.  Preview showed me the correct HTML rendering.  Thank you!

P.S.  It would be nice to not have to preview each question just to check the HTML rendering, or take the assessment….

I understand.  Unfortunately, its not something that is likely to change.  Mainly because the question listing is showing a truncated version of the question for readability (it doesn’t show the entire text of long questions).  If we were to leave the HTML intact for the question list, it would be truncated too and create a badly formatted HTML document and likely cause the remainder of the page to not display due to unclosed tags.  Also extensive use of line breaks or tables in the HTML (which many of our customers use) would cause the question list to be very difficult to look at.

I understand as well.  I also realized if you Print the Assessment you can check all the rendering there as well.  That works for me as I have to use that report to check lots of other things as well.  As always—you are big help.  Thank you!