Frequently Asked Questions

• What is Collab.md?
  Collab.md is an online collaborative markdown editor. Basically, you can write text together with others. Changes are synced in real time, so you can see what your friends are typing.
• What is Markdown?

  Markdown is a markup language. This means you write plain text, but have the possibility to apply formatting with easy to remember and type commands. For example to write bold text you simply type *bold text*. It's as simple as that. You might even know many of the format characters, as they are used in a lot of chat apps.

  But markdown is not limited to formatting only, it can also be used to add HTML-like tags, such as links or images, to your text. With Collab.md's extended Markdown flavour CMDMark you can do even more: emoji, labels, syntax highlighted code snippets, audio/video/website embedding,... There are endless possibilities!

• What does Collab.md mean?
  Collab is short for collaboration. md is the file extension of Markdown text. Some source code repositories use collab.md instead of contribute.md, which is a standard name for contribution guidelines.
• Which keyboard shortcuts does Collab.MD support?
  Ctrl + Z Undo
  Ctrl + Y  or  Shift + Ctrl + Z Redo
  Ctrl + D Duplicate current line
  
  Ctrl + B Toggle bold
  Ctrl + I Toggle italic
  Ctrl + Q Toggle code block
  Ctrl + I Toggle unordered list
  Ctrl + Shift + I Toggle ordered list
  Ctrl + H Make heading smaller
  Ctrl + Shift + H Make heading bigger
  Ctrl + L Insert link
  Ctrl + K Insert image
  
  ... and more! Hover the toolbar icons to see the corresponding keyboard shortcut.
• How are pads encrypted?

  If you enable encryption for a pad, industry-standard AES-256 is used to protect your texts. The OpenSSL library provides audited and secure inplementations of the algorithms used. Unlike many web developers, we know what we are doing - random IV and salt for each pad, not storing the password on the server after the pad has been encrypted - maximum security just for you.

  However, as long as the pad is opened by any user, the content is decrypted and kept in a temporary database. Why, you ask? Because the server needs to sync changes between all contributors of your pad. Imagine multiple persons writing on the same text. This could easily lead to everyone having a different local version - at the end there is no real true pad, just many different ones. A global authority (our server) can keep track of all changes and has a global correct version of the pad, which is synced across all parties.

  As long as the pad is opened the password and decrypted content is kept in a database. After it has been closed, everything is encrypted again and the password is deleted.