The K Desktop Environment

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2. Onscreen Fundamentals

KEdit is a simple text editor. It supports basic text with no formatting.

2.1 Drag and Drop

KEdit makes use of the KDE Drag and Drop protocol. This means that you can drag and drop files from the Desktop or kfm or some remote ftp site that you have open in one of kfm's windows on to KEdit.

2.2 Editing files on the Internet

You can open and save files transparently on the Internet. For example, choose File, Open URL and type

ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/Welcome.msg
in the edit field.

2.3 Printing

KEdit supports printing. You can either print the document your are editing or the selection you made directly to your default printer. Print will print the document that is written in the file and not what is displayed in the Editor. If changes are made without saving before printing, the changes will not be reflected in the printout. Optionally you can specify the printing command of your choice. There exist a number of printing utilities in the Unix world which are excellent. It would make little sense to try reimplement their efforts. Explicitly let me mention to you the following two printing utilites:

GNU enscript.

Markku Rossi has written a powerful reincarnation of Adobe's enscript ascii to postscript utility. My favorite usage is enscript -2rG text.txt, but GNU enscript goes far beyond that. Make sure you have the latest version from http://www.hut.fi/~mtr/genscript/, or any GNU mirror.

a2ps

Akim Demaille and Miguel Santana have written a powerful ascii to Postscript conversion utility which will format your output depending on the document type. Whether you want to print out C++ sources or an email message, the default styles are very nice. Get it from: http://www-inf.enst.fr/~demaille/a2ps.html

Make sure your system is set up for printing PostScript documents. If you don't have a native PostScript printer get yourself ghostscript/ghostview version 4.03 or higher from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/%7Eghost/. Note, that there are now commercial grade ps fonts available that come with the ghostview/ghostscript package. These fonts are a must for any quality printing of Postscript documents on a non-postscript printer. If you were disappointed with the results you got from ghostscript on your printer so far then get the new fonts, this will give you the best possible results.

2.4 Key Bindings

KEdit honors the following key bindings:

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