Starting from the top navigation bar (Fig 1), “Notebook” directs you to the meat of the ELN: the file tree and editor (Fig 2).


Fig 1. Navigation menu: Notebook


Fig 2. Notebook page, prior to selecting a notebook. On the left side is the file tree, on the right side is where the Editor will appear.

Using the file tree, users can create notebooks (akin to a folder) and within a given notebook, they can create pages (akin to a file). Notebooks and pages can be renamed, moved, copied, and deleted (note: deletion will eventually be disabled to preserve notebooks and pages that are older than a certain age). Once the user creates a notebook page, they can click on it to open the Editor (Fig 3).


Fig 3. Notebook page, after selecting a notebook. The editor is now visible on the right side of the screen.

The ELN Editor is the primary feature of the ELN. This is where users go to enter information about their experiments. As shown in Fig 3, the editor's structure is much like any other general purpose text editor. The editor toolbar has several expected functions: headings, font color, bold, italic, underline, sub- and super-scripts, text alignment, and lists.

Several supported features are consolidated under the Insert option. This is where users can insert Tables, Links, Code Blocks, Images, and more. Additionally, some features support auto-formatting (e.g. links, YouTube videos, tabular pasted values) or drag and drop (images).

But wait, there's more. Other editing features show up only when selecting text (e.g. highlight, strike-thru) or in context-dependent situations, such as when your cursor is inside a table, you will see table-specific formatting options. Others, like the Table of Contents, show up any time you've populated the editor with a particular type of content block – in this case, headers.

Finally, select features have shortcuts. Your standard shortcuts for undo, redo, bold, italic, and underline all work as expected. Beyond those, there are shortcuts for creating checklists, code blocks, and BioPACIFIC MIP-specific formatting blocks. You can view these at any time by hovering your mouse over “Editor Shortcuts” (top-right portion of the editor, across from the page's unique ID).