Creatext Tutorial pg 4

Section 3: Menus

Next, let's take a look at the Menus of Creatext. The pull down menus in Creatext offer things you will need to make your web page. There are many selections that bring up a dialog box for entering the data to automate many things that would take a lot of time, and knowledge, to manually enter into your HTML document.

^{3. Menus}
Under FILE, notice there's a selection for a New Blank Document. This choice opens a new document with all of the things you wanted included when you made your selections in Preferences. If you chose Nothing, a completely blank document will be opened.

Selecting New Document allows you to enter the specifications for your new document, if they are different from what you have chosen for all new documents in the Preferences. These items include:

Basic Settings
Appearence
Other

Let's take a look at these settings, now.

The first tab is Basic Settings and you are presented with two pull-down menus where you can select the type of HTML document you want: Strict HTML, Transitional HTML, or Frameset. Here again, if you have a working knowledge of HTML, you'll know which is the correct choice for your web page.

The second tab is Appearance Here, you make choices for the background color of your web page, the color for your text, links, visited links, active links and hover links. The Color Chooser is available for each choice. Just click the Chooser Button. Just click and choose a color for each item.

Under the tab labeled, Other, are spaces to fill in Meta Tags, Keywords and other things to help the Search Engines find you website.

Open From FTP allows you to open and edit an HTML document that resides on your web host's server. Of course, you will need to know the name of the server, your user name and password to do this.

Looking down the menu, you'll see Save to FTP, that brings up the same dialog box, shown above, where you enter information needed to contact your web host's server and Save your HTML document to the server.

The remainder of the File Menu, things like Print, etc., are self explanatory.

Now, let's look at the Edit Menu.,

Under Find, is the handy Find and Replace command. If there is something within your document you want to replace with something else, use the Find and Replace feature. Then, let's say you have a text color that appears many times in your HTML document, and you want to change that color to another color. The easiest and most accurate way to do that is with the Replace All feature. You simply type in the color number and the number you want it to be replaced with and click okay. The color number will be replaced throughout the document. Find Again will find another selection for you.

Show Clipboard History is a really nice feature to have. It will show the 50 most recent items copied to the clipboard. Just click the up or down arrows to cycle through the items. Select one and insert it into your document again. Note: this feature only works with Creatext and not with other applications, and it will only work with the foremost document window. Still, it's a real time-saving feature!

^{Web Menu}

The first items shown in the Web Menu are a selection of browsers for previewing your work. You will notice some browser selections are "grayed out." that means the programming to allow you to automatically view your document, from the tool bar, in those browsers has not been written into Creatext at the present time. Safari, and others, are something Marius is working on and I'm sure they will be included in future releases of Creatext.

NOTE: While you can't view your Creatext HTML document from the tool bar, you can drag and drop the Creatext HTML document on any web browser and check it that way.

Recolor Tags allows you to have all of your HTML tags recolored for easy identification.

Change Special Characters will change these characters to conform to HTML standards.

Special Characters has a submenu where you can select special characters to be inserted into your document. It will insert the HTML code for things like quote marks, a question mark, non-breaking spaces, these tag enclosures, < >, without them becoming active in the document. Very useful for showing HTML code in a tutorial or explanation where you need to show the actual HTML, but don't want it to be active, like this:
<TD> </TD> <FONT> </Font>

Change Tag Case will change all of your HTML tags to either UPPERCASE, or lowercase, for uniformity and easy location within the document.

Remove Resource Fork removes the resource fork of the document.

Create Thumbnail creates a thumbnail for graphic elements in your document. A handy feature to have.

The INSERT Menu

This particular menu has many useful features. So many, in fact, that it may take several pages to show them all. So, let's get started.

Selecting HTML or XHTML gives you choices of format for your web page. You can select HTML or XHTML with Strict DTD, Frame DTD, Transitional DTD, and whether you want a Body Tag inserted. With your choice, the necessary heading codes are automatically inserted into your document, as shown in Examples A and B, below.

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