Part III, Chapter 11. Being productive

Chapter 11. Being productive

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.