Everywhere you look in Mangia! you see pop-up menus like the one above. In Mangia!, these menus generally feature lists of Terms, such as names of ingredients or Nationalities. On almost every occasion in which you either need to or have the option of typing text, you also have the option of selecting a Term from one of these menus.
Basically, a Term is nothing but an entry in Mangia!'’s Dictionary. There is a section of the Dictionary for every important element of a recipe, from ingredients to cookbook references, and a Term in the Dictionary for every choice you might have there (for example, “fresh tomatoes” and “canned tomatoes” are two different Dictionary Terms). Wherever the Dictionary Button appears, you need to either type something that matches a Term in the Dictionary or choose a Term from a pop-up menu.
Why is that? Why not just allow the user to type in the parts of a recipe and not worry about matching existing Terms? Why? Because using Terms allows Mangia! to do so much more:
• Corrects spelling mistakes: If you mistype an ingredient in a recipe, then later look for recipes that use that ingredient, you’ll have to repeat that same mistyping to find the ingredient again. The use of Terms from the Dictionary automatically prevents such spelling mistakes.
• Makes recipes more compact: Once the Dictionary is set up, storing recipes as a collection of Terms makes the recipes much more compact on your hard disk, so not only can you fit more of them on a given size disk, but they read and write much faster.
• Provides for categorized searching: When you tell Mangia! you want to cook something with “nuts,” because of the way that the Term “nut” is defined, it is able to show you recipes that contain everything from pistachios to pecans.
• Provides for synonyms: Also because of the way Terms are predefined in the Dictionary, Mangia! considers such synonyms as “garbanzo beans” and “chickpeas” to be the same thing when searching for recipes.
• Helps you type: When typing a Term, you can usually just type its first few letters, then hit Command-? to have Mangia! automatically complete the Term for you.
If the set of Terms available in the Dictionary isn’t sufficient in a given case, you can always Create New Terms by simply selecting the New <whatever> item from the current pop-up menu. And, if you don’t like the spelling or categorization of an existing Term, you can use the Edit Dictionary item on the Edit menu to change it.
