Previous chapter may have given you the impression that
XXEW is straightforward to use but pretty low-level. This is not the
case. XXEW has most of the facilities found in word processors making
the user more productive at editing documents. (Corresponding 3min25 screencast .)
Quickly type some text
You
can type text only if the caret is inside a textual node
(text, comment or processing instruction nodes). Press
Tab to move the caret to the following textual
node. Press Shift-Tab to move the caret to the
preceding textual node.
Press Ins
(F1 on the Mac) to move the caret to the text node
found after the element currently containing the caret. If there is no
such text node then add a new empty one, that is, add a text placeholder
.
If you want to type
some text before the element currently containing the caret, use
Shift-Ins (Shift-F1 on the
Mac) instead of Ins.
Tip
The
Ins (F1 on the Mac) keyboard
shortcut is especially useful when you are typing some text inside a bold
or italic inline element and now want to end this inline element by typing
plain text after it.
Insert special
characters
Press Ctrl-SPACE to insert a non-breaking
space character (unicode U+00A0).
Type Esc n (that is, type
Esc then type n) to
display the dialog box letting you choose and insert a special
character by its name. Common special characters are:
ldquo“,
rdquo”,
trade™,
reg®,
mdash—.
Figure 11-1. The "Insert Character By Name" dialog box
Quickly select an
element
Ctrl-mouse-click
(Cmd-mouse-click on the Mac) selects the node
clicked upon. If you continue to
Ctrl-mouse-click without moving the mouse, this
selects the parent of currently selected node and so on until the root
element of the document has been selected.
Pressing Ctrl-ArrowUp
(Cmd-ArrowUp on the Mac) selects the textual
node containing the caret. Pressing
Ctrl-ArrowUp again selects the parent of
currently selected node and so on until the root element of the
document has been selected. Press
Ctrl-ArrowDown
(Cmd-ArrowDown on the Mac) to move the
selection down the node hierarchy.
Click the bullet or the number of a list item to select the
corresponding list item element. More generally if the view of an
element has a “decorative label” of some kind, clicking this label
selects the corresponding element.
Repeat some of the commands you have
already executed
Most commands which prompt the user to choose
an argument from a list are made repeatable. For example,
command Insert After displays a dialog box letting
you choose an element name or "#text" (a text node) from a list.
Once executed, there is a way to repeat exactly the same Insert
After command elsewhere in the document without having to
display the element choosers dialog box.
Pressing Ctrl-A
(Cmd-A on the Mac) repeats the execution of
last repeatable command, and this, as always, if and only if this is
allowed by the DTD or schema of the document given the current editing
context.
Pressing Ctrl+Shift-A
(Cmd+Shift-A on the Mac) displays a dialog box
letting you choose a repeatable command from a list in case you want
to repeat the execution of a command other than the last one.
The commands corresponding to the above keyboard shortcuts are
Repeat
and Command History. These commands are are both found
in the
"Edit" menu of the toolbar.
Quickly add the same
element
Pressing Enter at the very end of a
paragraph or list item adds a new paragraph or list item after current
one. Pressing Enter at the very beginning of a
paragraph or list item adds a new paragraph or list item before
current one.
Pressing Ctrl-Enter
(Cmd-Enter on the Mac) anywhere inside a
paragraph or list item adds a new paragraph or list item after current
one. Pressing Ctrl+Shift-Enter
(Cmd+Shift-Enter on the Mac) anywhere inside of
a paragraph or list item adds a new paragraph or list item before
current one.
Pressing Ctrl-Ins (Esc
s on the Mac; that is, type Esc
then type s) in implicitly or explicitly
selected element adds a new element of the same type after selected
element. Pressing Ctrl+Shift-Ins
(Esc S on the Mac; that is, type
Esc then type S) in
implicitly or explicitly selected element adds a new element of the
same type before selected element.
Use as much as possible
the commands found in the right side of the toolbar
The right
side of the toolbar depends on the type (e.g. DocBook, DITA Topic, XHTML)
of the document being edited and contains many commands which are
convenient to use. Moreover clicking , a small button found at the bottom/right of the
toolbar, displays a menu which contains even more convenient
commands.
Figure 11-2. The right side of the "DITA Topic" toolbar and its popup
menu
The "Text" section contain commands like Toggle Italic Inline
Element, Toggle Bold Inline Element, Convert to Plain
Text, etc, which are similar to those found in the
toolbars of most word processors.
The "Add" section contain commands like Paragraph, List
Item, Picture, etc, which, unlike Insert Before,
Insert, Insert After do
not require you to be precise in first implicitly or explicitly
selecting an element before executing the command. Instead, such
commands adds elements after the node selection or after the caret at
a location where it is valid to do so and where it makes
sense(1) to do so.
(1)
DITA example: even if the content model of a DITA
<p> element allows a <p>
to contain a <table>, the new
<table> element will be added by Add Table
somewhere after selected <p> and never
inside selected <p>.