The Scholar development team has created a unique technology for writing to the web, which is technically called a "semantic editor" (You can read a very long and technical version of this story by the designers of Scholar in Towards a Semantic Web).

The nice thing about this technology is that it has none of the clutter of a word processor—the hundreds of fonts and thousands of formatting options. Scholar has just one simple, elegant toolbar. And it is so much more powerful than a word processor—you can embed all kinds of media inline, including sound, video or dataset. For an introduction to Scholar's multimedia tools, see The Creator Workspace.

The toolbar is pretty self-explanatory—mouseover each icon to see a description of what it is for. For practical reasons, Scholar has to set limits on uploaded files. Currently, the limit for the account is 1 gigabyte. In the case of large video files, it is best to upload to YouTube or Vimeo, and use embedded media function in the Creator toolbar.

One of the innovative aspects of the Scholar technology is that there are no documents or files. Instead, there are "works" which are kept in a big database. Moving away from documents and files produces some huge advantages. One is that Scholar can reformat your work in a whole lot of ways—you'll see two already when you use the little print icon in the dark blue title bar: either a stunningly designed web page, or a beautifully typeset PDF. Before too long we'll be able offer you many other digital formats.

The other big advantage is that we can scan and datamine what you have done. The 'block quote' icon tells us that this piece of text is not yours and that it has not been plagiarized. The emphasis icon tells us which terms are important to you or different from the rest of the text. Students and teachers can also get a whole lot of assessment data, using Scholar's powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies.

However, here are two things you may find unusual at first:

• You cannot create more than one space at a time in the space bar in Scholar. One space means 'new word'. Two or more spaces would be meaningless. We want everything you do in Scholar to be meaningful. Also, you cannot type more than one space because when Scholar does the web and page design, more spaces would probably look terrible and ruin at least some or all of the flexible design options that Scholar offers.
• You cannot create linespaces using the carriage return in Scholar. One carriage return in Scholar means 'new paragraph'. You cannot enter two, because that would be meaningless. Nor can you indent paragraphs using spaces in the Creator text entry space, but when you output your work as pdf, it is beautifully laid out with indented paragraphs.

For information about how to get started in Scholar's Creator space, watch Starting a Work.

Use the Structure tool to plan out your headings and divide your work into sections or 'elements' (Creator => About This Work => Structure). When you mouse over each heading in the structure tool, you can use the move tool to move whole sections (drag up/down), or create subsections (drag to the right/left). (A tip: never use the emphasis tool for headings or subheadings in Scholar. Always use the structure tool because then Scholar knows what you mean.) To see how the structure tool works, see The Structure Tool.

And one last thing. Do use Scholar's unique 'Checker' tool as you write (Creator => Feedback => Checker). Checker scans one element (or section) at a time. Unlike spelling or grammar checkers which sometimes tell you something is wrong when it is not, Scholar's checker only makes change suggestions, and these include synonyms, in case you may wish to change a word. By opening the little arrow beside each possible change, you get an explanation of the suggestion. If you want to accept a suggestion, hover over the change and select the green arrow. To see how the checker works, see Checker.

To see how to submit your draft, see Submitting a Draft.

Comment: If you have a question about Scholar, ask it in the comments box below this update. Another community member is likely to know the answer!