This chapter introduces the commands that act on a letter as a whole: it is a question of auxiliary functions to text writing like searching or substituting of words within the text or changing the window background. These commands are conveniently grouped in the Utilities menu.
Word Searching
The command Find… opens a dialog in which you can write the word or phrase to be searched for. ‘My Letters’ ignores stylistic variations when comparing characters. The character case, however, is not ignored: the letter ‘A’ is considered to be different from the letter ‘a’.
The searching begins always from the insertion point or after the last character of the current selection. If specified characters are found they are selected and then the selection is scrolled into view if not already visible. If searching reaches the end of the letter a dialog is displayed giving you the possibility to continue searching from the beginning of the letter.
The command Find Again finds the next occurence of the text specified by the Find command.
You can search for at most 255 characters which can be typed directly from the keyboard or copied from the letter and pasted in the Find… dialog.
Word Substitution
Any sequence of characters (words, phrases or numbers) can be substituted with some other sequence using the Replace… command. Substitution takes place over the entire text ignoring stylistic variations and replacing all the occurences. Substituting begins always at the beginning of the letter and stops at its end. When finished the last substitution is scrolled into view if not already visible.
Palettes
The palettes are windows that remain always in front of all the others. Buttons are positioned on the palettes which enable you to attain to often used commands directly on screen instead through the menus.
ΓÇÿMy LettersΓÇÖ is provided with three palettes: the Font palette, the Tools palette and the Keyword palette, all obtainable from the Utilities menu. Every palette is provided with the Balloon HelpΓäó.
Font Palette
The Font palette enables you to set the font type with which the text is written. The names of fonts in the palette are written in the respective font so that you can see the aspect that the characters written in this particular font will have in text. Generally, the Font palette will not contain all the fonts available but only a fixed set of them, at most six.
Tools Palette
The Tools palette contains the most frequently used commands for paragraph formatting: justification and line spacing. The symbols in the buttons are similar to those that can be seen besides the equivalent menu commands in the Paragraph menu.
Keyword Palette
The Keyword palette permits to insert directly into the text, at the insertion point or instead of the current selection, the Keywords available from ΓÇÿMy LettersΓÇÖ, without the need to insert them from keyboard. For further information use of the Balloon HelpΓäó.
Background Color
The Background Color… command presents a dialog enabling you to define a background color for your letter, which is normally white. Don't forget that vivid colors will fatigue your eyes. Light colors are recommended for a continuous use.
Page Breaks
To visualize how the text will be paginated on the printed page, select the Show Page Breaks command which will draw a gray horizontal line at the end of every printed page. If the letter occupies less then one page, no line will be displayed.
Statistics
The command Statistics… opens a dialog window showing the principal statistic data of the text: the number of characters, words, lines and paragraphs as well as several medium values like the medium number of characters per word.
