Formatting text in UBL

Subject: UBL & text formatting

Dear Enric and Cecile,

With those in copy, we’ve discussed whether users can format their text in procurement notices. After some analysis, Yves informed us that this is not possible – because UBL doesn’t allow it. As our UBL experts, may I ask you to confirm this? If it’s really the case, would you suggest that we include it as a change request for UBL, or can OP act unilaterally, e.g. by saying that “(e.g.) markdown in free text notices will be parsed and displayed by TED”? Or would you propose another approach?

The use case for formatting text in notices is unsurprising (similarly to formatting text anywhere) – it makes the text easier to read (otherwise users wouldn’t use it). For example, fields such as Description or Additional Information can have up to 10,000 characters, i.e. 2.5 pages. These texts can be dealing with several separate topic, which a user may want to distinguish with headlines, which could require for example different font sizes, bold, italics.

Similarly, italics can be useful to distinguish publication and quotations or just for emphasis. Superscript is part of certain names (e.g. PM^2^). And so on.

Thank you for your views!

Kind regards,