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Chapter 2
Editing Basics

This chapter describes basic procedures of document content development.

2.1 Document Sections

In the previous chapter, we have shown how to create new document, and how to add major sections (parts and chapters). This section describes how to further structure the chapter displayed in the editor.

As you will see, many commands may be invoked using the context-sensitive popup menu. In particular, if you want to create a new subsection, just right-click the mouse at the position where the new subsection should be. A menu pops up, see Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1 Creating new Subsection Using Popup Menu

In the upper part, the popup menu shows available commands that may be applied to the whole document. Below, there are commands available for the current part of the document, from the most specific part—the current paragraph, to more general part—the chapter. If you activate the last command, a new section is added to the document, see Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2 Subsection Created

If you display a popup menu again, you have three sets of context-sensitive commands: for the current paragraph, for the subsection 1.1, and for the chapter. You may create new section sibling to 1.1, or new subsection, i.e. section 1.1., or join the section 1.1 with the main section. You may also change the structure of the document by dragging sections, paragraphs etc. in the local structure pane, located at the bottom-left part of the main frame.

2.2 Moving and Copying Objects

Frequently, you need to move parts of the document to another location, or create a copy of some document part. The BookEditor offers two ways of moving and copying material. The traditional method is to use the system clipboard to exchange material. The second option is to drag & drop objects in the Local Document Structure pane.

2.2.1 Copying and Moving using the Clipboard

The “Copy & Paste” is a traditional method of moving and copying material. First, you need to make a selection, either by dragging the mouse over a document portion, or by moving the cursor by arrow keys while holding the Shift key. The selection is indicated by changed foreground and background color of the selected text. Then you may either copy the selected material to the clipboard, by pressing Ctrl–Insert, or cut it (copy it to the clipboard while deleting the original selection) by pressing Shift–Delete. Once you have copied the material onto the clipboard, you may move the cursor to a place where you want to paste the material, and press Shift–Insert. You may create as many copies of the clipboard as you need.

2.2.2 Copying and Moving using the Document Structure Pane

Alternative method to using clipboard is moving and copying objects by dragging them in one of the document structure panes. This method is more convenient when you want to move or copy well-separated objects, such as whole paragraphs, tables, sections etc. To move an object, just drag it in one of the Document Structure panes. You may drop an object either beside existing object, which is indicated by a line above or below the target object, for example you may put a paragraph after existing paragraph. Alternatively, you may put an object inside existing object, which is indicated by a rectangle around the target object. For example, you may put a paragraph or a section inside existing section.

2.3 Paragraph Formatting

When you are editing a paragraph, you may apply various formatting styles to the text. You can use toolbar buttons for bold, for italic, for typewriter, for underline, and for strike-through. Alternatively, you may use corresponding keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+U, Ctrl+I, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+U or Ctrl-Shift-S. If there is some text selected, the formatting is applied to the selection. If nothing is selected, but the text cursor is in the middle of a word, the formatting is applied to the word. Otherwise, the formatting is not applied to any existing text, but to the newly typed text. If you apply some formatting to text that already bears the formatting, the formatting is turned off.

There are more special-purpose formatting actions. The language formatting (toolbar button ) can be used to set language for a phrase. If you want to cite a foreign-language phrase, you may want to explicitly set its language, to avoid spelling errors, and to ensure correct hyphenation. The button can be used to associate selected text with index entry, see Section 6.1. The button can be used to cancel formatting under text cursor.

2.4 Creating Cross-References

If you need to insert a hyperlink, also known as cross-reference, to a numbered document element (section, table, figure, equation, or list item), use Insert Hyperlink toolbar button , or just press Ctrl-L. A Select Cross-Reference Target window shows up, see Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3 Select Cross-reference Target Window

After you select an element in the window, either by double-clicking it or by pressing Enter, a hyperlink pointing to the the target element is inserted to the document at the cursor position, displaying the title of the target, such as “Chapter 5” or “Equation (3.2)”. The hyperlink is associated with the target element, which means that it automatically changes when the number of the target element changes.

You can also use the hyperlink to navigate to the target element using mouse click. If you want to navigate the hyperlink in editing mode, you need to hold the Ctrl key before clicking, otherwise the hyperlink is just selected for editing.

If you want the hyperlink to have text different that the automatically generated title of its target, click it with mouse, and invoke the Editable command from the popup menu. Then just change the hyperlink text as required. This time, however, the hyperlink text does not change when the hyperlink target number changes.

Note that the automatically generated hyperlink text contains, besides the target number, also the type of the target, such as “Chapter” or “Equation”. This is particularly useful when the context in which the document can be used is not known during the document authoring. For instance, you may not know whether particular document section will be at chapter or section level in final document configuration, so you don't want to write the Chapter or Section words directly to section cross-references, but let the framework to synthesize these words automatically. However, in some languages, such as Czech or German, you may need to insert an inflected form of the Chapter or Section words, such as “V Kapitole 5”, which the framework cannot do for you automatically. In this case, toggle the Include Target Name state of the hyperlink, using the respective command from the popup menu. The target text then includes only the number of the target element. The target name, which is no longer a part of the hyperlink text, may be typed manually then.

It is also possible to create a hyperlink to some external page on the Internet, via its Uniform Resource Locator (URL). One possibility is just to type the page's URL to your document. When you type the start of the URL, such as http://, the text is automatically turned into hyperlink, which is indicated with its green color. This is useful if the title of the hyperlink is equal to its URL. Alternatively, you may type a title of the hyperlink, which may be any text, select it, and use the toolbar button. The title is turned into a hyperlink, and you are prompted to provide its URL. The URL may be changed later by the Set URL popup menu command.

2.5 Setting Properties of Objects

2.6 Creating Lists

The Editor offers four types of lists: unordered lists, ordered lists, description lists, and TO-DO lists. Each list has corresponding button in the Paragraph toolbar: , , and , which may be used to insert an empty instance of the respective list into the document. The unordered list uses various types of bullets to indicate its items. The ordered list uses various types of numbering (Arabic numbers, Roman numbers, Latin or Greek letters, etc.) The description list has items consisting of term, typeset in bold, and its definition. The TO-DO list decorates its items with an empty box, indicating uncompleted item, or box with check mark, indicating completed item. You may toggle the uncompleted/completed state by clicking the box.

To add new item to existing list, put the cursor at the end of an existing item, and press Enter. A new empty item is added after the selected item. You may also use one of commands from the context menu—you may insert item before or after the current item, or add a new empty paragraph after the list containing the current item.

2.7 Creating Tables

To insert new table to your document, use the or toolbar button. The first option should be used when you want to insert a titled, numbered table, the second is for inserting just a table without a numbered caption. By default, a table with a single empty cell is inserted. If you want to insert a table with more cells, click the button, and drag mouse below and right the button, until the table has the desired size.

When the text cursor is inside a table, the toolbar provides buttons for changing the structure of the table. The or buttons may be used to add new column to the right edge of the table, or new row to the bottom edge of the table, respectively. The and buttons insert new column or row left to or above the current cell, respectively. The and buttons delete the column or row containing the current cell, respectively.

There is also a toolbar for manipulating the current cell. The and merges the current cell with the cell right to it or below it, respectively. You may set the horizontal alignment of a cell to left (), center (), right (), decimal () or justified (). The vertical alignment may be top (), middle () or bottom ().

You may also specify the borders of tables. By default, tables do not have borders, but note that in editing mode a light border is always displayed as a visual aid. You may assign a table some class (see Section 2.5) which adds a border to the table. For instance, the table class border causes all cells of the table to have regular border.

You may also override the default border properties individually for each border line. You may choose from a set of predefined border types, or use border with an ad-hoc properties. To modify borders of table cells, press the button in the Table Border toolbar, and select a predefined border type from the list right to the button. Then contour borders you want to set to the selected type, by mouse dragging. The empty item in the list of border types restores the borders to their default, which is usually regular border or empty border, depending on the table class. You may also specify ad-hoc properties of the border, i.e. its width, color and line style.