New Features In 3.0.21

Improved Tag Colouring

Your HTML tags will be coloured much faster than before ! The options regarding the colouring of tags have also changed accordingly - check out the Tools/Options/Colouring screen for more.

Save As HTML

This is more of a workaround than a fix, since the problem lies in the Common Dialog object. A default file extension, the type that is automatically appended to a file name during a Save As operation if no extension is typed, can only be 3 characters long. So if you choose html as your default then save without typing .htm on the end, the Common Dialog box will trim this to 3 characters (htm).

If you go to Tools/Options, choose the Editing tab, enter your long default document extension and click the checkbox that appears below it. You will see All Files during the Save As process, but this is a necessary evil :-(

Improved Table Editing

You can now insert rows and columns by using a right-click on the table editor and choosing from the menu. You can also highlight text in your document that is separated by tabs and/or carriage returns and by calling the table editor this will be added to the table.

If you have copied that to the clipboard you can also paste into a table cell and the table will stretch to accomodate the new cells. And try dragging files from the Resource Manager into a table cell - a correct HTML link or image tag will be created for you, exactly the same as if you'd dragged into your document.

This also means you can copy information directly from Excel spreadsheets and paste it into our table editor.

Improved Remote Editing

The layout of the WWW tab has been altered to make it easier to do remote editing. Simply right click on the top panel and choose Edit WWW Servers to store your FTP details (password is optional). When you save the information the host name will be added to the top panel. Expand the host name and wait for the the connection to be made. Open the web pages, edit them, and save them - all the FTP work is done for you !

Tab key available

You can press the tab key to insert tabs into your document. Use this in conjunction with the table editor to quickly make HTML tables.

Revised Local Files Tab

The Resource Manager's Files tab now tells you file size and the last update time, as well as the file name. You can right click to pull up a menu of useful commands. The Make Link command will apply to multiple highlighted files.

More Installation Information

The Help About screen now gives you access to version information from the files that HotDog installed on your system. This is mainly there so you can quickly and easily give us information if any problems should arise with HotDog on your system. If you want to add more files to the list of those being checked, simply edit the [Version Check] section of your HotDog.INI file.

Multi File Find And Replace

Besides fixing some problems, we have added the option to change the extension of HTM file to HTML.

Improved HEAD section maintenance

HotDog now only rebuilds the appropriate tags when you use the Document Info tab. It will not alter any of the other tags you include in the HEAD section.

New features in Find & Replace dialog

You can now choose to find and/or replace [Tab] and [End of Line] characters. In addition you can choose these as a part of your find or replace targets. For example, replace ">[End of Line]" with ">" will remove the carriage returns after any HTML tags.

User Defined wildcards in "Files" tab

The [Extra File Types] section can be used to add your favourite local file system wildcards. Try "*.wav;*.au;*.ram" to cover popular audio formats !

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Page Builder

Use this feature to put components together to build a web page. The components include paragraphs, images, lines, email and hypertext links etc. Click on a component (right-hand side) to create a new instance of that component, fill in the blanks, and click the "Insert" button. The component will be added to the tree list on the left hand side - from there you can rearrange the order components, or click on them to change their values. You can click on "Preview" at any time to compile the HTML and send it out to the current document.

Page Builder files (\builder\*.bui) can also appear in the File New dialog.

Dynamic Dialog / Plugins

Based on the same technology as the page builder, this uses scripts to show more complex, less flexible, wizard pages. We have implemented support for over twenty Netscape plugins with this scripting system, but it can be used for anything at all.

ActiveX

This will search your system for OCX and ActiveX components, find their parameters, display them to you and all you to set values and build OBJECT tags from your choices.

Style Sheets

The immense power of style sheets has been included in this release of HotDog. Put simply, a style sheet applies sophisticated formatting information to a whole document, and can modify the appearance of any tag in the document. There's far too much in them to write about here so take a look at www.w3.org for more information.

Floating Body Builder

The form which defines your Body tag is now a floating form which updates your web page as you change its values. Click on the "less/more" button to alter the way you change the colours - you can drag a picture from the Resource Manager Files tab onto the sample area to make it your background image.

New Faves !

MSIE and Netscape Bookmarks have been added to the list of favourites that can be displayed. You can drag links out of them into your own Fave Links section to avoid having to load them all the time :-)

To add items to the various Faves lists, the general method is to highlight a chunk of text in a document (HTML view), hold the Shift key down and the right mouse button, and drag it into the list. Yes, it's a weird drag-drop combination but all the other key combinations are used :-(

There are a couple of exceptions: to add items to the Fave Tags list you must drag items from the floating Tags window. Use the Tags menu to bring it up, then search for any specific tags you want that aren't currently shown.

You can drag links from the MSIE and Netscape lists into your Faves Links list.

Add Text to Images

Use this feature to add text to your images. You can superimpose the text (any font or colour you want) over the image itself, or as a caption beneath the image.

Download Web Site

Given a starting web page this feature will download an entire web site, make a local mirror of its directory structure and create a HotDog project for you.

Bandwidth Buster

Use this feature to change a whole web site, making it more bandwidth-friendly. It changes GIF to JPEG, reduces JPEG compression, adds HEIGHT, WIDTH and ALT tags to images that don't already have them and gives you a range of options to help produce a faster set of pages.

More Drag and Drop

With the introduction of the Resource Manager on the left side of the editing area you now have the ability to drag files into many of HotDog's dialogs instead of browsing for them. For this release not all of these places have been found, so we'd like some feedback as to other cool drag and drop opportunities.

Always Maximise Documents

For those who like all their documents maximised there's now an option on the Tools / Options screen to set this feature permanently on.

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There's a bunch more little tweaks and bug fixes in here too. As always please let us know of any suggestions you have. You can email suggestions to support@sausage.com.au

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Introduction

Welcome to the HotDog Web Page Editor ! The first important lesson to learn about HotDog is that almost everything is customizable.

• Don't like our shortcut keys ? Change them with the Tools / Shortcut Keys screen.
• Want more toolbars, or would you like to design your own ? Use the Tools / Customize Toolbars screen to change it all.
• Do you want HotDog to look like a glorified Notepad ? Go to the View and Toolbars menus and turn off everything you can find :-)

Only you know the best environment for your web work, so we've made HotDog as flexible as possible. A quick scope through the Tools / Options screen and the View menu is a good way to find out some of the things you can change. Go forth and customize !

New Features

HotDog Professional introduces a suite of new features that will have you creating cool web pages faster than ever before.

Fixed Toolbar

For those not ready to jump into full-scale customizing of the Dog we have added a sequence of fixed toolbars at the top of the screen. Use the View menu to turn this 'Main Toolbar' on or off. It contains buttons that call HotDog's most useful functions and many of the most frequently used HTML tags.

Dockable Toolbars

The floating toolbars now boast new graphics and can be docked to any side of the screen. Right click on any toolbar to modify it

Link Resource Manager

The information panel on the left of the main screen was originally called by a menu item titled Sniff Page's Butt but HotDog is more civilized than that ! Its function is to show you what links are in each page you've got open (or in your current project), list your local files, give you a preview of any graphic you point to, show you broken links, and allow you to drag files into your document to make references to them. The Faves panel allows you to keep frequently used URLs, HTML tags or chunks of text right on hand. Use Shift-right mouse button tro drag items into the lists.

Phew ! Try dragging a graphic file in - you'll not only see the picture, but you'll get a relative link, height, width and default ALT tag. Drag an HTML file to the blank area around your files (if they're not maximised) to open it, or click on the 'Open Web Page' button. Double click on any link to have that link highlighted.

If you open a project all the files will be listed in the Link Resource Manager instead of the files being opened. You can change this by calling the "Open Project" dialog and clicking on the checkbox marked "Open all project files as documents". Watch out though ! It can take a while to open every document in a project, so consider the idea of having the files listed in the Resource Manager, ready to be opened at your request.

Whenever you open, close or save a file the Link Resource Manager will be refreshed to reflect any link changes. This makes it perfect for finding and fixing broken links - I found three straight away in my own fairly large web site that I didn't know were there !

Instant Project-Wide Search and Replace ! : Shift-click on any of the references in a page and you're starting off a global search-and-replace action ! The new value you enter can be applied to all the documents listed in the Resource Manager, and will be written to open and unopened files. It's like a subset of the Multi File Find and Replace because it only applies to the current project

Remote Editing is one of the cool new features in this release of HotDog. Click on the WWW tab to see a list of servers (use the "Edit WWW Servers" button to add your server to the list) and simply open the server to start editing the files on it. Click on a graphic and you'll get a thumbnail image of that file. There's a popup right mouse button menu that allows you to save any file on the server to your PC, and you can also use the File menu's Save Remote command to save the current document you're working on to whichever remote directory you are currently pointing to.

Edit External File

This command, which is accessed from the default right mouse button menu, will send a file "out to Windows" and whichever piece of software has been defined as the associated program. For example, .GIF and .JPG files might be handled by Paint Shop Pro. Point the cursor at the file (you don't have to highlight it) and call Edit External File - that's all ! You can also double click the Link Resource Manager's image preview. Use the Edit/External Viewers to set new executables for handling certain types of file extension. For example you may want .htm files to be opened in HotDog instead of your browser. This function uses command line options to "ask" the program to open the file being passed. If it does not support command line options then it won't work.

Plugins

This is a major new piece of functionality. You can now have other programs listed inside HotDog's menu structures. You can assign shortcut keys to them and include them in floating toolbars (their icons will be extracted and shown in the toolbar). This is all currently controlled from the [Plugins] section of the HOTDOG.INI file and there is no screen to let you define them because it is supposed to be done by third party companies, but you can edit the HOTDOG.INI file yourself. The structure is very simple :

1=c:\foo\bar.exe,Edit,Foobar Rules

The Edit menu will have Foobar Rules added to the end of the menu options. When selected it will call c:\foo\bar.exe. In addition ANY programs in the PLUGINS subdirectory (under the HotDog installation directory) will be listed in the Tools/Plugins menu option.

OLE Automation

Your program can now query HotDog about a wide range of things, and can pass information back into HotDog. Information like the currently highlighted text, the current filename, the handle of the current window, HotDog's directory and MUCH more (including some handy document parsing routines), has been available through OLE Automation. If you know what this means then no further explanation is needed :-) Just add Hotdogpro.exe to your list of references and use your object browser to look through the functions on offer. Not all have yet been fleshed out, but all that have been commented will work.

Tabs Inside Documents

The Format Document screen has been split into two tabs that sit atop the HTML document you're working on. Meta tags have been expanded and listed in the Document Info tags. Use them to make search engines display more meaningful description of your page, or to add Client Side Pull to your page. This will make your page jump to another location after a certain number of seconds have passed.

Rover has been moved to a tab and we now use the Sax Webster control to display web pages. It comes with a built in history list, print function, save function etc. Right click on it to adjust Rover's width or to open the current document in HotDog. Naturally you CAN see the rest of the web with it.

Snaglets

Four of our most popular snaglets have been included in this release. Go to Tools/Snaglets and use the Text Effects, Frames, Client-Side Image Map or Animator. The Animator and Text Effects use Java while the other two are normal HTML. Remember to ship the right Java class files (look in the CLASSES directory) to your web server !