New Features Most of the new features are covered under specific topics. Sorry for the length; there have been a lot of changes: ⌥ New Simplified HTML.edit Tools Palette Option Version 1.7 now includes a checkbox option (on Editor Preferences) to use a simplified version of the HTML.edit Tools palette. The simplified palette doesn't include support for forms, tables, document hilighting or indexing, but it will suffice for many documents (or HTML.edit beginners). ⌥ FORMS Support Version 1.7 sports new HTML Forms features. Forms support includes all HTML 2.0 form widgets, including conversion of a text selection into radio buttons or popUp menus. ⌥ TABLES Support Version 1.7 also features HTML Tables, including importing, exporting and translation (text to table, table to text), with a choice of delimiters each direction (eg. comma, tab, etc.). ⌥ New Forms, Tables and HTML Format Tool Palettes Three new floating palettes to speed document formatting, available as a "Show Palette" command at the bottom of their respective menus. ⌥ New Find & Replace Commands Version 1.7.3 includes new multi-mode Find (Command-F) and Find Again (Command-G) commands, as well as an improved Replace command (including first occurrence, selection only, current document, and global replacement), all located under the Utility menu. ⌥ Customizable HTML Elements Version 1.7 simplifies the transition to HTML 3.0 with the addition of two features: the Style menu on the floating tool palette is created from the contents of modifiable HTML style tables located in HTML Preferences, and the Clip Library, a floating window that stores often-used text which can be entered into your document simply by clicking on the desired item. Text can be cut or copied to the Clip Library from the Edit menu. New in 1.7.1: A third style submenu ("Custom") has been added to the Style menu. Also, any line in the Clip Library containing three items (in the same format as the Style menu's style tables) is treated as a custom HTML tag. See Clip Library Custom HTML Elements for more details. ⌥ Conversion Commands Table conversion, unwrap text, paragraph conversion, a text preprocessor and other text conversion commands have been added, all under the Utility menu. ⌥ Key Shortcuts A number of added key shortcuts speed markup of text. As a sample, Shift-Enter selects the current paragraph (in preparation for adding
and
tags using Option-Return); Command-Shift-E adds tags, while Control-Shift-E adds tags but removes any existing surrounding tags; Control-Delete removes the tags surrounding the current text selection. This in addition to the key shortcuts from previous versions. ⌥ Save & Restore Preferences Beginning with Version 1.7, HTML.edit saves current settings (including the Hotlist, all conversion tables and libraries) to a Preferences file. Settings may be restored at any time from a stored Preferences file. This allows easier transitioning between HTML.edit versions, as well as personalizing the editor for multiple users. ⌥ Document #include Feature Version 1.7 features a document inclusion feature, similar to the C programming language's #include statement. Check out the new Custom Entity feature found on the Conversion Preferences section. You can assign up to ten custom entities to the contents of any document, master header or footer. On export, the specified contents are inserted into your document in place of the custom entity. This allows for greater modularity and reuse of HTML coding. These custom entities show up under the hierarchical menu command "Insert Custom Entity" on the Utility menu. ⌥ Paste File Command Located under the Edit menu, the Paste File command pastes a selected text file at the current insertion point in your document. ⌥ Export Conversion Table Version 1.7 now features a customizable Export Conversion Table, which allows you to leave translation of special characters or strings until the document is exported, allowing easier reading of your source documents while in HTML.edit. How about all instances of your name turning into either a mailto: or link to your personal page? Or all those European words with their many diacriticals? Check Conversion Preferences for more information. ⌥ Document Preview Menu Supports both WWW browser Preview as well as browsing of online documents via the BASE address of the current document, a manually-entered URL, or a URL from the Hotlist. This is all implemented using the new Preview menu. You can also set your browser's View Source application to HTML.edit to capture and view online documents. ⌥ HTML Element Indexing and Hilighting At the bottom of the HyperText, Anchor, Heading and Style palette menus is the Index HTML command, which returns a list of instances of a specific HTML tag within your document. Also available is the Hilight HTML command. This will hilight the chosen tags rather than returning an index list. This is particularly helpful in hilighting (ie., underlining) the hypertext of your document. The choice of font and hilighting style is set under Editor Preferences. ⌥ New, Simplified Anchors For creating quick named anchors and hypertext links, TouchLink™ simplifies the process enormously. Simply select the destination text, choose the TouchLink™ command (Command-Shift-L), then navigate to the linking document (if different than the destination), select the link text and click one button on the floating palette. Presto! Both link and destination are created, even between separate documents on the same server. For creating quick links to the previous, next or a selected document, a simple Command-7, 8, or 9 (respectively) creates the link at the current insertion point in your text. Additionally, holding down the Option key while performing this shortcut adds the document TITLE as the hypertext. See Anchor menu for more information. ⌥ Table of Contents Generation You can now automatically generate a Table of Contents of all documents in the editor, or just those with a selected label. You can also generate a table of contents of the Named Anchors within the current document. ⌥ Character Entity Entry, Conversion and Reconversion Allows simplified entry and conversion of special character entities to HTML representations (such as ‘ü’ to ‘ü’, ‘&’ to ‘&’), as well as reconversion of HTML character representations to their original special characters using three commands in the Entity submenu under the HyperText menu. This should be of help to European WWW users who wish to retranslate downloaded HTML source to readable text. Version 1.7 now includes an Export Conversion option to convert special characters upon export, allowing easier reading of source documents that contain many diacritical marks. See Conversion Preferences for more information. ⌥ Import/Export Hotlist, Clip and Image Libraries Now you can import Mosaic and Netscape bookmark files, as well as import and export the Hotlist, Clip Library and Image Library as text files. The Hotlist menu is now created from a list of anchors, and allows you to view the title of the URL on the menu, not the URL itself. See HotList & Image Library Preferences for more information. ⌥ Application Window Size Note that you can option-drag on the document (not application window) zoom box, which brings up a popup menu to resize the HTML.edit application window. You can drag the resize box (in the lower right corner) to make the window as large as you wish. Note that very large windows will take up more memory. No, I'm not kidding. It's a larger bitmap space, so it needs more memory. If you're confused about the window terminology, check Window Elements for a visual description. ⌥ Keyword Utility Allows simple collection of keywords by clicking on words in your HTML document. Text in the keyword field can be used for the META element's CONTENT attribute where HTTP-EQUIV="keywords". Don't worry if you didn't catch that last one. Neither did I. For more information, see the Utility menu. ⌥ Balloon Help Includes balloon help for most on-screen buttons and fields. ⌥ PowerPC™ Native Mode Support Now available in three versions: the "68K" version for 680x0 (non-PowerPC) Macintoshes; the "PPC" version, which runs in native mode on Power Macintosh platforms (only); and the "FAT" version, which runs on either a 680x0 or Power Macintosh. ⌥ This editor is a standalone application and does not require HyperCard to run. It's larger than a stack, as it includes the HyperCard engine. The advantage is that HyperCard 2.3 is not required to use it. Since we're still operating in the HyperCard environment, I've added an automatic stack compaction feature, also set by Compacting Preferences. ⌥ The Index card has been substantially improved, with a cleaner interface and new document management features (such as sorting and labelling). ⌥ Performs HTML structural error checking. The Add All Structural Tags command found in the palette Structure submenu (under the HyperText menu on the Tool palette) adds all structural elements and checks for duplicates and correct placement. Yes, you can fool it, but it works pretty well. ⌥ Supports an Undo command which restores the original text selection. ⌥,
and HTML 2.0