<META name="Description" content="This page describes some techniques for using CreaText">
<META name="Keywords" content="Main window, buttons, drag & drop, drag and drop, insert, open with, view with">
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Working with CreaText
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The main window
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The main window is undoubted CreaText's most important element. If you create a new document or open an existing document, the text content is displayed in a main window. In the text field of the main window you enter the HTML code and change it.<BR> <BR>
<B>The buttons</B><BR>
An easy way to access basic commands for file operation and HTML features are the buttons above the text field. An overview:<BR>
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<LI>Button with caption 'Recolor'</LI>
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Colors all HTML Tags, Strings, Comments and Doctypes so they are easy recognizable. You can change the colors in the <A href="prefs">Preferences</A> dialog. Unfortunately, Tag coloring is so slow I cannot make it real time. If you recolor very large documents, it can take some time. If you want to abort it, press Command-Period(.).<BR>
CreaText also offers the option to color Tags in a line when switching to the next or previous line. Usually, this is done very quickly. If it works too slow for you, go to the <A href="prefs">Preferences</A> dialog and disable it.
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<LI>Button with caption 'Special'</LI>
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<LI>Changes all special characters to HTML entities.</LI>
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<LI>Button with caption 'Comment'</LI>
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Inserts the HTML code for a comment into the text field. If some text was selected, the selected text is put into the comment.
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<LI>Button with table icon</LI>
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Shows the table dialog where you can create tables.
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<LI>Button with color icon</LI>
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<LI>Opens the <A href="cc">Color chooser</A>.
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<LI>Button(s) with Web Browser icon(s)</LI>
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When starting, CreaText searches all mounted volumes for the Web Browsers Internet Explorer, Netscape, iCab, HelpViewer, Opera and OmniWeb. The icons on the right side show which Browsers were found. If a particular Browser is on your hard disk and CreaText doesn't find it, you have to rebuild your desktop database.
When you push a button, the respective Browser is launched. If you want to preview a document which has not been saved before, CreaText puts a temporary file into the folder called "Temporary files" in your CreaText folder. When CreaText quits, all files in this folder will be deleted.<BR>
(Note: At the moment, there will be no icon displayed for OmniWeb because I don't have MacOS X)
<TD>At the bottom left in the main window, you can see an area which displays the current line, the character number in this line and how many lines the document has (in the image left, this would mean line 112, 42nd character, 121 total lines). You can disable the display of the current character number in the <A href="prefs">Preferences</A>.</TD>
<TD>If you want to jump to a certain line, press this area. A dialog appears where you can enter the line in which you want to jump (compare image left). If the line number is greater than the total number of lines, CreaText will jump to the last line.</TD>
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<B>Easy line break and paragraph insertion</B><BR>
The text field has some features that makes working with CreaText easier. If you press the Enter button on your keyboard, a new line is entered. To do this analogous to HTML, where a <<FONT color="blue">BR</FONT>> Tag makes a new line, you can use the combination Option-Enter to insert a <<FONT color="blue">BR</FONT>> Tag. Use the combination Shift-Enter to insert a paragraph, with the Tag <<FONT color="blue">P</FONT>>.<BR>
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<B>Drag & Drop</B><BR>
If you drag a file from the Finder and drop it on the text field of a CreaText main window, a dialog opens where the Mac path of the file and a possible HTML path are shown. If the file is a text file, you can insert it as a link or as a frame source. If the file is an image file (JPEG, GIF, ...), you can insert it using the <<FONT color="blue">IMG</FONT>> Tag. In this case, you can also pass the file to the Image dialog. If it is not already chosen, select "Image" from the "Type" pop-up menu, then select the "Image" from the "Pass to dialog" pop-up menu and press the "Pass" button.<BR>
You can also select "Multimedia" from the "Type" pop-up menu to insert the file using the <<FONT color="blue">EMBED</FONT>> Tag or to pass it to the Multimedia dialog.<BR>
Note: In the <A href="prefs">Preferences</A> dialog you can also customize CreaText's drag & drop behaviour.
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The Insert menu
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The Insert menu serves as a collection of dialogs which help you use HTML commands. So you don't have to know every HTML Tag and attribute.<BR>
Normally, you would open such a dialog, enter some information, and the dialog inserts it as a HTML command. All dialogs in CreaText use the same formatting for HTML commands:<BR>
There are some HTML commands which can include selected text in the text field in the main window, e.g. the Paragraph; then it would look like this:<BR>
If you use the "Meta Tag" or one of the "JavaScript" or one of the "CSS" dialogs, CreaText automatically places the Tags and contents into the <<FONT color="blue">HEAD</FONT>>.<P></P>
