PageMill How to...

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Make links:

1. Drag and Drop Methods

You can drag and drop the little page icon found to the left of the Title in a page editing view:
These icons, called proxies, can always be dragged to establish a use of that page. (These proxies also exist on the image view.) To create a link from one document to another, simply:

• select the text that you want to be linked FROM (i.e. underlined in blue).
• drag the proxy of the page that you want to link TO, and drop the proxy on the selection.

That will create a link. It's actually even easier: if you simply drag the proxy from the destination document and drop it in another page where no selection exists, it will create a link for you including the title of the destination document as the blue underlined text! (You can obviously go retype whatever the linked text is, without affecting to which file the link actually points.)

Once you've made a link, try out your links by going into preview mode (using the edit-preview mode toggle button), and press on your newly-linked text to travel to the other page.

Note: A page or image only has a "proxy" once the file has been saved - if you want to link to a file but it has no proxy, try saving it first.

2. Copy / paste (a.k.a. "stealing" links!)

Simply steal the link you need from another page: open it with PageMill, then just copy & paste the blue linked text from one place to another. You can also drag & drop that blue linked text directly from one page to another.

Did you know that when you triple-click on a link you select the whole link ? That can be handy for selecting the whole link before you drag it somewhere else.

Handy tip: If you triple-click on top of linked text, the entire link will be selected. Thus, it's very easy to just grab the whole link in one fell swoop.

3. Direct typing of URL's ("links")

You may notice that either in preview mode, or when an entire range of linked text is selected, the Link Display Bar shows the text of the URL to be visited (see the Pictorial Tour for details). Not only can text appear there, but you can edit it there! Thus, at any time, you can select some text, click down into the Link Display Bar area, and type a url.

Tip: hitting "Enter" will move the cursor from the main body of the window down into the Link Display Bar for immediate typing into it.

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Use the cursor:

Double click
... selects the entire word surrounding the cursor.

Triple click
... selects the entire range of linked text surrounding the cursor (or if there's none, it selects the entire line of text)

Shift click
... extends the range of the current text selection.

Clicking on a selection
... lets you drag that selection elsewhere, thereby moving it. (Or, you can hold the option key down to make a copy of the selection being moved.)

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Introduce images:

Hitting the "insert image" button
...gives you a file dialog to specify an image to place in the file (actually, it creates a reference to the original file, but it appears in the flow of the document).

Dragging an image's file icon from the Finder
...puts the image in the file.

Dragging an image from the Scrapbook (or any draggable application)
...puts the image in the file.

Special note: if a PICT-format file is introduced, it is automatically converted to a GIF file, and stored in the directory specified in your preferences (see the EDIT menu).

Dragging an image PROXY from an image view
...puts the image in the file. Dragging an image proxy from an image view WITH THE COMMAND KEY DOWN
...puts a link to the image in the file. This is analogous to dragging a page proxy onto a selection, where a link is created.

Type:

Accented characters can be typed like any other Mac application.
PageMill automatically converts these extended characters into the appropriate ISO encoding when writing out HTML.

Note: there are a number of characters in the ASCII set that are not representable in HTML. These characters will be filtered out when being pasted or dragged in from outside.