Bottom     Previous     Contents

Exercise five Editing a document

In this part of the tutorial you will learn how to:

You are going to edit a document that is identical to the project you wrote earlier.

Open a document

A window will open showing part of the document.

Note: If you have a printer driver loaded you may get a warning that the paper size is different to that used in the document. Click Ok to reformat the document.

Resize window

You can increase the window size by clicking in the Toggle size icon in the top right hand corner of the window.

The window will open to the full size of your screen.

When a document is larger than the size of the window used to display it you can use the scroll bars to bring different parts of the document into view.

Scrolling

Try the following ways to scroll around the document:

Note: If you click Adjust instead of Select the direction of scrolling will be reversed.

When you have finished, press Home to scroll back to the beginning of the document.

Hide ruler

Hide the ruler to see more of the contents of the document.

The ruler will disappear.

Zooming

EasiWriter documents can also be zoomed in and out so that you can see more, or less, of the document in the window. You can zoom a document by clicking on the zoom icons or by setting the percentage scale value directly.

Zooming out

The document will reduce to half its normal size enabling you to see more of it. The percentage magnification indicator will change to 50%.

Zooming in

You can return to the normal magnification by zooming in.

The document will return to its normal size.

Documents can be zoomed between 10% and 999%.

Choosing the scale

When you have finished you can easily restore the document magnification to 100%.

  1. Click on the Percentage size indicator (the number between the Zoom in and Zoom out icons).
    A dialogue box will appear where you can specify the magnification you want.
  2. Click on 100% and click Scale to restore the document to its normal size.

Selections

Editing actions such as changing fonts, copying or removing text are performed on selections. When something is selected it is highlighted. EasiWriter has a number of different ways of selecting text: using the mouse, clicking on the Selection indicator, using the Select menu, or pressing F11.

The following exercises will show you some of the options. For more details see Chapter two - Using EasiWriter.

Selecting text

  1. Move the mouse pointer to the left of the word 'Bob' at the beginning of the last paragraph.
  2. Press Select and drag to the right of the word 'student'.
  3. Release Select.

The first seven words in the paragraph will be selected.

The selection will be extended.

Selecting words

A word can be selected by double-clicking on it.

Notice that the entire word has been selected.

Note that after a double-click EasiWriter extends the selection in whole words.

As an alternative try the following:

  1. Double-click on a word and keep Select depressed.
  2. Drag to a different part of the document and notice that the selection extends by words.

Selecting a paragraph

Entire paragraphs can be selected by triple-clicking on them.

  1. Move the mouse pointer anywhere in the second paragraph of this section and click Select three times in quick succession.
    Notice that the entire paragraph has been selected.
  2. Move the mouse pointer anywhere in the last paragraph and click Adjust.

Once again the selection has extended by the amount of the first selection. In this case a paragraph.

Select menu

Selections can also be made using the Select menu.

The Select menu shows you the structure of the document starting from the caret position working outwards.

For example this document contains a chapter; the chapter contains a chapter heading and chapter body; the chapter body contains sections which in turn contain section headings and section bodies. From then on things are not quite uniform as the section bodies contain different things. Some contain paragraphs, others lists, figures and tables.

To get a better idea how the Select menu works try the following:

  1. Click in one of the paragraphs in the 'Conclusion' section.
  2. Click on the Percentage size button. A dialogue box will appear.
  3. Click the Scale to fit button.

The scale of the document will be adjusted so that a full page automatically fits the window - even if the window is resized.

You are now going to use the Select submenu so that you can see the effect of the various choices on the document.

  1. Click Menu over the Selection indicator (it will say 'Text selection' when nothing is selected).
  2. Now move the pointer into the Select submenu title bar and drag it to the right.

Taking care to use Adjust, so that the menu remains on the screen, do the following and observe carefully which part of the document is selected:

  1. Choose Paragraph.
    The paragraph containing the caret is selected.
  2. Choose §Section body.
    The section body containing the caret is selected (but not the section heading).

  3. Choose §Section.
  4. Choose Chapter body followed by Chapter.

Because the entire document is a single chapter choosing the Document and Document body will have no noticeable effect.

Selection indicator

The Selection indicator can be used to make selections. Each time it is clicked it selects out through the document structure which is the same as choosing the next item in the Select menu. For example, if the caret is in a paragraph that is part of a section the first click will select the paragraph, the second click the section body and so on. Clicking with Adjust has the reverse effect and lets you select back down through levels of structure.

F11

Function key F11 can also be used to select out, Shift-F11 to select in.

Resizing the document

You are now going to restore the document to normal magnification for the last part of this exercise.

  1. Click on the Percentage size button to open the Scale view dialogue box.
  2. Click on the 100% button and click Scale.

Moving text using Drag and Drop

In addition to using Cut and Paste, blocks of text can be easily moved from one part of a document to another, or from one document to another, using Drag and Drop.

  1. Press Page Down to scroll the last section into view.
  2. Select the second paragraph in this section 'In its earlier stages...'.
  3. Position the mouse pointer over the selection, press Select and drag the selected text over the second paragraph. Do not release Select yet.
    As you drag, notice the blue dashed box showing you the size of the area being dragged. You should also see a caret moving through the text under the box. This is called the Ghost caret and it shows you exactly where the text will go when you release the Select.
  4. Move the ghost caret to right of the last word of the document and release Select. The selection will be inserted at the position of the ghost caret.

Revert

Not every change you make to a document is desirable. In addition to its Undo command EasiWriter has a Revert command that lets you revert to the version of the document that was last saved.

  1. Choose Revert from the Misc menu.
    A dialogue box will appear asking you to confirm that you want to revert to the last saved version.
  2. Click the Revert button to confirm the choice.

The document will revert to the last version saved.

Spell checking

EasiWriter has a powerful spell checker that can check spelling as you type, check an entire document or part of a document.

Although supplied with a British English dictionary, with optional dictionaries it can also check spelling in most of the European languages and American English. User dictionaries allow you to add your own words to the list of words that EasiWriter understands.

EasiWriter will check the document and the Spelling dialogue box will appear.

In it you will see:

Ignore

The Ignore button allows you to tell EasiWriter to accept the current spelling of the word.

EasiWriter now displays the next word it doesn't understand. In this case 'Ouse'.

Learn

You can get EasiWriter to learn new words.

Because Ouse has been entered into the dictionary with a capital 'O' EasiWriter will not accept 'ouse' as a correct spelling.

On the other hand, words entered in lower case letters will be accepted by EasiWriter in either upper or lower case.

Replace

The next word shown is 'appraoched' which has two of its letters transposed. This time EasiWriter makes three guesses with the correct choice highlighted.

The next word in the list is 'pulld'. This time EasiWriter makes a number of suggestions in the scrollable list. You may need to click on the Down scroll arrow to see all of them. The actual word we want is the fourth word in the list - 'pulled'.

  1. Click on the word 'pulled' to highlight it (or use the Down arrow keys to move to it).
  2. Click Replace.

Finally EasiWriter queries the word 'ouse'. Because you added the word to the user dictionary earlier with an uppercase 'O' EasiWriter is able to show you the capitalisation error.

Done

The Spelling complete dialogue appears to show you that all the corrections have been made.

EasiWriter makes the corrections and reformats the document.

Find and replace

EasiWriter has Find and Replace routines that allow you to:

Searches can be made both forwards and backwards and start at the caret position. To search an entire document, move the caret to its beginning ( Ctrl-Up arrow) and search forwards.

Search for text

As an exercise, search for all instances of 'how' in the document.

  1. Press Ctrl-Up arrow to move the caret to the start of the document.
  2. Click Select on the Find button (F4).
  3. Type 'how' into the Find writable icon.
  4. Click the Find button.

EasiWriter will find the word 'how' in the second paragraph of the list.

Find same

Once a search pattern has been found, you can search for other instances of it by using the Find same command in the Search menu or by clicking Adjust on the Find button.

  1. Click Adjust on the Find button.
    EasiWriter will find a second word 'how'.
  2. Press Shift-F4 (the keyboard equivalent of Find same).

This time EasiWriter will find the 'how' in 'shown'. If you press Shift-F4 a second time it will find the 'how' in 'showing'.

Search for words

To limit the search to whole words you need to click the 'Whole word' option icon.

  1. Click Select on the Find button (F4).
  2. Click the Whole word and Search backwards option icons.
  3. Click Find.

This time EasiWriter will search backwards through the text ignoring the 'how' in 'shown' and 'showing'.

If you press Shift-F4 again a beep will indicate that there are no more instances to be found.

Replacing

You decide to change the name of the character in the report from 'Bob' to 'Roberto'. He is, after all, supposed to be a foreign exchange student.

  1. Click on the Find button (F4).
  2. Edit the Find text writable icon to 'bob'
  3. Press Return and type 'Roberto' into the Replace with writable icon.
  4. Click the Replace all button.

All instances of 'Bob' will be replaced with 'Roberto' and the document will have been automatically reformatted.

Summary

In this section you have learnt how to:


Next     Top