If all you would like to see when you active a placemark by clicking on it is the NAME you gave the placemark (the label) then you may not care about all the rest of this tutorial, and those to follow. If however, you would like to be more creative, and provide more information and photos to users of your placemark data, and maybe LINK to other web sites directly from your placemark, read on.

Perhaps an example would help. I have edited the file we saved at the completion of Tutorial #5 and a small amount of data to illustrate what I mean. It is retitled to St_Paul_Fire_Stations_v2.kmz, and is linked here. Right-click, and 'Save Link As..,', or 'Save Target As...', to download it to your GE. Then you get...

Okay the file 'lands' in your 'Temporary Places' folder. You need to save it to the 'My Places' folder. How? (remember Tutorial #4, Question 6). Right-click and select 'Save to My Places'. now you should have...

If you dbl-click the Station 1 Placemark you will get this...

THIS is a formatted Placemark BALLOON. It has the placemark label, the name of the fire company located in the station in bold characters, and on separate lines. On another line is some text, and a web site link to a location OFF this page. Also included is a thumbnail sized photo of the station. The station photo is also a web site link to an off-site page. Also included (for 'free') are driving directions links both TO and FROM your location.

How did all that information get into this 'balloon'? Well, you have arrived at the purpose of this (and the first previous 5, and future) tutorials! We're going to teach you how to perform the needed steps to generate similar placemarks of YOUR design in your placemark files, and share them with the world.

Is it difficult to do that 'nerdy' stuff? Nope. We will start with the 'baby steps', and move along one step at a time.

Formatting? In its simplest form it means things like picking a font for text, like Arial vs. a Times New Roman font. Or making the font bold, or italics, or underlined. Using larger, or smaller sized fonts. Or setting the alignment of paragraphs, like left, centered, or right. You mean kind of like word processing software does. Well yes, we have to 'tell it' when to do 'this', and when to do 'that'. It's the 'telling' part that may be new for you. Is it hard. No. It just has some rules to follow. Follow the rules (I'll provide LOTS of explained examples, with photos too) and pretty soon you'll be surprised what you can do.

Okay, but what about all that photo stuff, and the 'web links'. Again just some more rules to follow. But guess what, once you do it ONE TIME, all the other times you need to something like it, you just copy what you already did, and make small changes.

So where does all this information with all these 'rules' go? First we need to bring back the placemark properties dialog box of Station 4, like this...

It all goes right in here, into this large empty (for now) textbox of the placemarks DESCRIPTION field. Lets start simple. Just type 'This is line one of text' into the Description textbox. Then click 'OK' saving your entry. Then dbl-click the Station 4 placemark and you should see this...

Look at that. The label from the placemark is there (as it was before we did any of this description stuff), but also whatever we typed into the description textbox is also there now in the balloon. The placemark properties description textbox looks like this...

Not only is the text we typed in the description field, but it also shows up in the placemark in the PLACES panel. Lets add something to the description. On ANOTHER LINE add 'This is line two of text' to the description. Like this...

Select "OK', to save your entry. Then dbl-click the placemark, and we get...

We typed two lines into the description field, and we got two separate lines in the balloon. Thats easy. But what about these RULES you talked about. I don't see any rules in use.

Well you are correct, we haven't used any formatting rules yet. lets try a very simple rule. I would like to have the FONT of the first line we entered become BOLDED. so the lines we entered would look like this in the balloon...

This is line of text        (line is bold)
This is line two of text    (line is not bold)

So, what's the rule to create a BOLD look? We have to supply some 'instructions' in a form that GE understands to perform some work formatting 'behind the scenes'. We do that in the form a MARKUP command. Markup, whats that?

Here's a RULE to bold this line...

<b> Bold this line </b>

I've made the markup commands red so that they are easily viewed. The coloring is only for your ease of understanding, the colors are not part of the 'markup'.

The letter 'b' stands for BOLD, and the '<' 'less than', and '>' 'greater than' brackets are what tell GE (and other programs too) that whats inside them is a formatting (markup) command. The first 'b' means to START BOLDING FROM HERE, and the '/b' means STOP BOLDING HERE.

So, the markup commands (the RULES) are most always in PAIRS. A start, and a stop command, located in brackets.

Let's alter what we previously type into the placemarks description textbox a bit. Change the first line we entered to this...

Select 'OK' to save your entry. The dbl-click the Station 4 placemark. And you'll get this...

Well, part of that worked. Our first line of text DID get bolded (thats good) in the balloon. But look what happened to our previously two separated lines. Now they are both on the same line and wrapping. What the heck happened?

Don't worry. What happened to the 'two separate lines' being now on one is simply because we are just learning how to do this formatting stuff. We are going to fix our problem in the following question.

We need a bit of review to make sure we all understand this 'markup stuff'. The things we type into the Placemarks description field can be EITHER what we can refer to as 'visible text' (stuff we want to 'user' to see in our placemark balloon), OR, it can be MARKUP COMMANDS (rules), which are instructions to do something specific, like bolding some set of characters.

These MARKUP COMMANDS are defined (found in) BRACKETS <...>. And typically (but not always) are found in pairs, with the ENDING ONE containing a SLASH like this </...>.

As in our bolding rule which was, <b> Bold this line </b> .

The text entered in BETWEEN the brackets (our 'visible text') gets displayed (shown) to the user. Any commands (the rules) located in the brackets, and the brackets themselves, get 'acted upon', as in 'doing the bolding', but DO NOT get displayed to the user.

Remembering, that in Question #2 (above), we has first entered two lines of text into the description textbox. Then when we showed the placemark balloon they showed up as two separate lines. Then we applied the bolding command to the first line of text. Now the first line of text became BOLD (yippeee!), but the previously separate LINE 2 of text all of sudden became stuck right on to the end of line 1 with no break between them. Why?.

Well, there is the deep technical programmers type explanation, or there is the 'short one'. Lets try the short one.

Before we entered our first MARKUP COMMAND (rule) the description textbox was 'dumb', kinda 'brain dead'. But as soon as we used are first markup command (anything containing a set of brackets) the description textbox 'woke up', and all of a sudden became 'non-brain-dead'. But upon 'waking up' it also became rigid in the requirement for EVERYTHING to need a rule, even including the need to give rules WHEN TO BREAK A LINE of text. Guess what. We didn't tell the two lines we entered that they should be on separate lines. Boy, picky huh! Yup.

But, wait a second you say. When we typed them in we entered them on two separate lines. We typed one line in, then hit the ENTER KEY (the Return key), and then entered the next line. When you do that in your Word program, or even in Notepad THEY don't run the lines together, they are separate. What's the deal?

In a program like Word, or Notepad when you hit the ENTER KEY at the end of a line, you may (or may not) know that the computer ADDS ONE or TWO normally unseen CONTROL CHARACTERS to the end of your line. One OR TWO? Yup. with the OR being the key word. The whole world does not use the PC. Some people use Macs. The whole world does not all use Windows as their operating system. Some people use Unix, some use MacOS, some use Linex. And guess what, they all ACT DIFFERENT as to whether they add ONE or TWO of these unseen CONTROL CHARACTERS to the end of their lines.

So what, who cares? What are these control characters for anyway? Well, the one or two control characters we are dealing with here are the CARRIAGE RETURN and LINE FEED characters. The what? The PRINTER control characters that told the mechanical printer head to go back to the beginning of the printing line, and to advance the paper UP ONE LINE. You mean there is computer stuff that does that? Well, there is not only computer 'stuff' that does that, there WAS TELEGRAPH stuff that did that. Remember the old newspaper Teletypewriter machines. That is how far back all this CARRIAGE RETURN and LINE FEED stuff goes back to. And as a result we are all (whether we know it or not) dealing with it today.

Enough with history lesson. What the heck does that have to do with a 'brain-dead' textbox in a 'todays' program like Google Earth? It's not Google Earth's 'fault'. It pertains to the original folks who thought up the idea of computer MARKUP LANGUAGES. It goes all the way back to 1967, with the first Standardized General Markup Language or SGML. And the its later descendent's HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), XML (the eXtensible Markup Language), XHTML (the eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language), and Googles KML (the Keyhole Markup Language) and its "Zipped' derivative KMZ (Zipped KML). BTW, Google Earth, the program, was named "Keyhole Earth", before Google bought it. Background info on markup languages history can be found here.

Okay, but what's your point! What's markup anyway? It comes from the 'marking up' of a manuscript by a proofreader prior to PRINTING the manuscript. There's that word 'printer' again. Why? Because in the 'old days' before things got somewhat standardized like today, the mechanical printers of the day were all different. Some printers wanted two 'controls' to tell the printer head what to do, and some only needed one. Yuuuck.

Okay here comes the point. So, the original developers of computer markup languages, knowing they were dealing with a WIDE VARIETY of non-standard PRINTER MACHINES said 'screw-it', and decided that in their original versions of the markup languages they decided NOT TO RECOGNIZE ANY control characters. So the markup language we are using in this case, (a sub-set of HTML) does not even know that you hit the ENTER KEY on your keyboard.

So, you mean we have to tell our 'descriptions' just how to do EVERYTHING just because of some dumb old mechanical printer machines. Yup. But instead of a bad thing, we are going to show you how to turn this seemingly 'bad' idea into you advantage.

Easy. We just need to use another markup command, the BREAK command. Like this...

To separate this line from the next one
<br>
use the BREAK command

The line break is the letters 'br' surrounded by brackets. It one of the examples where there is NO 'stop breaking' command. The command </br> DOES NOT EXIST. But to satisfy some folks who complained that every command should have an 'end command', there an alternate BREAK command like this...

<br />  with a space REQUIRED between the 'br' and the '/'

Either one works. The alternate <b /> is the newer, and the preferred one.

Lets alter our Station 4 placemark properties to look like this and see what happens.

And now our placemark balloon looks like this...

Well, good. Now we're back to two separate lines. And remember at the end of our previous question I mentioned using the 'lets forget about control characters' idea to our advantage. If we retype our placemarks properties to look like this, what do we get?

And our balloon looks like...

Hummm, the same as before, on TWO separate lines again. Remember, the now NON-brain-dead placemark properties textbox DOES NOT CARE WHETHER YOU TYPE THE 'ENTER' KEY. So as far as its concerned, the two different ways we entered out text WORKS (gets formatted) the SAME way.

But, you say, the second example is NOT very easy for us to READ. You're right. let's try this...

Now I have separated the BOLD command start and end, onto its own lines. And indented the first line of text. And separated the BREAK command onto its own line, separated by Blank lines in between. And the finally the second line of text.

And guess what, the BALLOON LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME. Not only does the now BRAIN-ALIVE textbox forget about 'Enter keys', it also FORGETS ABOUT blank lines, and leading or trailing SPACES. Notice line one of text is INDENTED in the textbox, but in the placemark balloon it's right there at the left margin just like before.

So, if your still with me... If the textbox (the markup language) conveniently forgets about control characters, and WHITESPACE (nerd'ish for leading and trailing spaces), then we could type our desired text in such a way that 'reading' the 'marked up' text would be a WHOLE LOT EASIER. You BET! And thats why the 'old markup designer guys' forgot about all that stuff. Not only that but, they forgot about all this stuff whether you're on a PC, a Mac, you're running Windows, Unix, Linex, or whatever. Humm. Maybe they were not so dumb after all.

The first command we have been learned was the Bold command. It is part of a group of commands that belong to the text STYLES. Here are most of the styles commands.

Commands	Examples
<b> Bold </b>	You can bold any amount of text by surrounding it with the bold command.
<i> Italics </i>	Certain words can be made to look important by the using italics.
<u> Underline </u>	Using the underline text style is not that difficult.
<s> Strike Out </s>	It's not used very often, but on occasion the strike out may be helpful.
Subscript <sub> subscript </sub>	In the chemical formula for Sulphuric Acid, H2SO4, the '2' and the '4' are subscripts.
Superscript <sup> superscript </sup>	When you need to trademarkTM some text the superscript is useful.
<big> Big </big>	There are other ways to do it, but the BIG command makes a portion of the text use a larger font.
<small> Small </small>	And of course the opposite of big is to use text in a Small font.
<tt> Typewriter </tt>	The typewriter command provides the little used monospaced font style.
<em> Emphasized </em>	The emphasized command provides the newer logical equivalent of italics.
<strong> Strong </strong>	And the Strong command is the newer equivalent of the Bold command.
<code> Code </code>	The code command (along with the <pre> command) is a way to present pre formatted computer code, is a bit beyond our present discussion.

The table of commands and examples gives us a good look at the application of most of the Style commands. Now, it is your chance to practice them by entering the examples into Station 4's placemark description textbox. We will REPLACE our previously typed examples in the description textbox with our new entries. Remember you also need to provide line breaks to make your entries look good. Here's my entries in my textbox...

Unfortunately the description textbox above may be somewhat intimidating. It does not allow for any coloring of the text. So here is the same text from the description textbox that I've added some colors too that maybe separates the 'wheat' and 'chaff' for you.

Now if you've entered all the sample text this is what your placemark balloon should look like...

You should have noticed several things about the sample formatting text above. One, is the use of several line breaks (<br />) in a row. The first 'break' provides the separator to prevent the lines from 'joining together', and the second break provides an 'empty' blank line for spacing. And second, the use of multiple command tags (the < > stuff) in sections of text. You can use as MANY as you desire to accomplish your desired formatting. At lastly, in the 'code' tag example there were TWO tags used together, the <code> and the <pre> tags. We will deal a lot more with the use of NESTED tags in the next and subsequent questions.

Finally, considering the long list of style commands a comment about typical usage is worthwhile. You may be wondering how you will ever remember ALL these commands. Don't worry. I don't remember them all either. But there are NUMEROUS sources on the web where there are references and examples of the tags. Those references links will be provided in these tutorials. And second, the number of them you will 'use' frequently is small. I use BOLD, and ITALICS about 90% of the time, and all the rest of them put together seldom, with some almost never.

So, for example a small piece of text like this, "This sample meets the qualifications ...", by having one word that is Bold, Italics, and Underlined all at once.

It is done by NESTING one command tag within another. You could enter the formatted word 'qualifications' like this...
"This sample meets the <b><i><u>qualifications</u></i></b> ..."

Which has the Underline command surrounded by the Italics command, all surrounded by the Bold command. Or, (remembering our brain-alive forgets about control characters), you could type it like THIS...

"This sample meets the
  <b>
        <i>
          <u>
              qualifications
          </u>
        </i>
  </b>
..."

Which will produce the exact same results. I have added the colors and the indentations to illustrate the NESTING. Notice when each command starts and ends in relationship to the previous command. For example the Underline command started LAST so it must end FIRST. Think off putting on pairs of socks, one after another. If you put on THREE socks, and you numbered them 1,2 and 3, with 1 on the inside. You could not get to sock number 1 before you first removed number 3, then number 2.

This scheme of nesting commands, which we will use a LOT, follows for all commands (unless it is a 'non-ending' command, like the <br /> command) from now on.

Lets add this small sample code (in BOTH layout styles) to the end of what we have already for Station 4's placemark description balloon, like this...

And our placemark balloon now look like this no matter which layout style (indents or not) we choose...

Well, here's a RED DIVIDING RULE...

How do you figure what means what? Sounds like it would be a good thing if there was SOME organization that would take all the manufacturers, all the software organizations, all the computer languages that are used on the 'web', and try to make sense out of a whole lot of conflicting goals and ideas.

Well, there is just such an organization, known as the "W3C", the "World Wide Web Consortium", who'es purpose is to set standards, and make recommendations regarding 'The Web'. They are THE Standards organization for the web. They also provide training, as produce 'documents' (web pages) for all of us to visit that contain an attempt to make order out of potential disaster.

So, the bottom line is that there are LOTS of places where folks have made documents, and small training examples, on how to deal with, among others, the multi-named web colors issue.

Most modern computers are capable of displaying about 16 MILLION colors. Obviously, each of these 16 million choices do not have a unique name (even though they DO have a unique number). And early on in this 'color' naming game the W3C recognized they were dealing with a mess. So, to start off they DEFINED 16 standard colors, that all browsers would recognize by the same unique name. Now 16, is not 16 million, but it was a start. Here is that list known as the "W3C Standard Color Names".

W3C Standard Color Names
Color Name	Number	Sample Color
aqua	#00FFFF
black	#000000
blue	#0000FF
fuscia	#FF00FF
grey	#808080
green	#008000
lime	#00FF00
maroon	#800000
navy	#000080
olive	#808000
purple	#800080
red	#FF0000
silver	#C0C0C0
teal	#008080
white	#FFFFFF
yellow	#FFFF00

The table above contains the name, the number (in hex), and a sample of the color. Of the 16 million colors available, mostly for full color photo images, these 16 colors when used for rule colors, or font colors will due justice to a great deal of typical needs.

But just in case you need more named colors the W3C created a list of 150 colors (including the 16 standard colors above) that work on all major web browsers. The link to view that list is at the end of this paragraph. Feel free to look over other related pages on this W3C training site, but BE WARNED, this W3C site contains training for FULL HTML tags. There many tags, and many attributes for these tags, that DO NOT APPLY to be used in a Placemark Description field. Here is the link to the W3C HTML training pages.

Now we can add several horizontal lines to out previous Station #4 placemark description textbox. Let's add two HR's, one 'plain', and one 'colored', like this...

Here is a portion (near the end) of the texbox code colored so you can see the new entries easier. First, I entered a non-colored (plain) HR just prior to the text we entered in our Answer #7 (above). And, second I entered a HR with a RED hex number (a color="#ff0000") attribute added to the standard HR command. I also added several extra line breaks (<br />) to adjust the spacing a bit. Now our placemark balloon look like this...

Now you should see our two horzontal lines added to near the end of the balloon, one plain, and one in red. I have save out work so far to a new file named St_Paul_Fire_Stations_v3.kmz you can download and use for a reference.

We learned about...

• What is a Placemark balloon, plain and formatted
• How to apply a simple formatting rule
• How to apply a LINE BREAK rule
• How to apply various basic TEXT STYLES to text
• How to apply MULTIPLE text styles to text
• How to add ATTRIBUTES such as 'color' to a formatting rule
• How to add HORIZONTAL RULE LINES to a placemark balloon