IRIX 6.5 Applications 1999 November

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- 1 - 3. _C_h_a_n_g_e_s__a_n_d__A_d_d_i_t_i_o_n_s Cosmo Create encompasses the functionality of the previously released WebMagic application. This chapter lists the major changes and additions available in Cosmo Create that were not in the last release of WebMagic. 3.1 _M_a_j_o_r__N_e_w__F_e_a_t_u_r_e_s +o Port to 6.2 - You must have installed at least Irix 6.2 to install Cosmo Create. +o Cosmo Create no longer requires a license to run. +o Tables - Tables are now shown WYSIWYG. Tables will be displayed very similarly to how they look in Netscape Navigator, you can create tables, edit their contents, change their attributes, etc. See Chapter 5 for limitations. +o Cosmo Create supports the creation and editing of frames. +o Cosmo Create now allows the viewing and editing of the raw HTML source. Edits can be fed back into the main document and previewed directly in a web browser. +o Helper Applications - You can launch Photoshop, Cosmo Worlds, Image Works, xv or enhance on the appropriate element (an image or a VRML plug-in, for example) from the Editors palette if you have these applications installed on your system. If the currently selected inline is editable by the helper app, it will ungrey and be active. When the out of place edits of the inline data are finished, the inline area in page will update to reflect the changes. For applications with the appropriate conversion rules, you can launch the out of place editor on the original content, and when the edit completes, the data will be auto converted back into the web-compatible format inlined into the page. The conversion rules are specified in the Converting panel of the Preferences panel. Also, if the appropriate prototype file is installed on the system for a particular editor and converter, you can launch it on an empty inline area to create content for the inline area. +o Showcase - Showcase is now available as a helper application. A Showcase file can be drag-and-dropped onto a page, and it will be converted into a gif and - 2 - displayed as an inline image. If the image is highlighted on the page, then Showcase will be available in the Editors palette as a helper application. Launching Showcase on the inlined file will allow you to edit the original Showcase document. When the Showcase document is saved, the inline gif will be updated to represent the new state of the Showcase file. NNNNooootttteeee:::: The Showcase-to-gif converter requires that either Ghostscript and eoe.sw.imagetools, or Impressario _p_s_r_i_p be installed on the machine. Impressario is preferred because it produces higher quality output. +o Button creation tool - Button Magic lets you create nicely rendered, antialiased images of buttons with 2D or 3D text labels for use as buttons, bullets, or titles. An alpha channel is used so that the buttons blend correctly with the background. You can choose among various shapes and fonts, and you can alter the appearance of any button in endless combinations by choosing lighting effects, colors, and textures. +o Run Once - Cosmo Create uses so called "run-once with multiple documents" behavior. If Cosmo Create is already running on the system, attempts to run additional copies of the program will simply open a new editing window in the original program. If you explicitly need to have multiple copies of Cosmo Create running, you can specify "-runmany" as a command-line argument. See the cosmocreate(1) man page for details. +o 24-bit Imaging - Cosmo Create now defaults to using a 24-bit visual for high quality color and image display. If a 24-bit visual is not available on the system, the default system visual is used. +o A Perl CGI script can be generated from the FORM dialog. This script contains the basic boilerplate for a CGI script and lists the form variables and values. +o Sweeping out and interactively resizing inlines - You can drag out image, applet, plug-in, and whitespace regions. After dragging out, the inline will be selected and the editor dialog will pop up. At any point, you can interactively resize any of these inline objects. Holding down the Shift key will constrain their aspect ratios. - 3 - +o Improved inline attributes editor - The user can enter an original, rich representation for an inline (such as an rgb file), and have a web-compatible stand-in (such as a gif) generated automatically for it. The stand-in type can be selected from the popup menu displaying all the known conversions. To disable the writing out of width and height tags, there is a new unit type called Unset that effectively unconstrains that dimension and suppresses the tag on output. This unset unit type can also be used to reset the image to its default size, or the Default button can be used. +o Live plug-ins - Plug-ins display live just as they would in Netscape, including full page plug-ins (for Netscape 2.x). However, full plug-in functionality is not yet available, and so certain plug-ins may behave poorly in Cosmo Create if the plug-ins are not written carefully. Live Applets are not viewable. See Chapter 5 for more information. +o Spell checking - Cosmo Create now offers you the ability to spell check your documents, in a number of languages. +o Floating Tools - Tools can now be left floating on the desktop after use and will continue to track the insertion point and current selection. +o File type rules - The FTR database is now used rather than globbing to determine the type of files imported/drag-n-dropped into Cosmo Create. Also, a new panel on the attributes dialog allows you to specify what to do with each filetype, i.e. whether it should be linked or inlined as an image, applet, or plug-in. +o Link generation commands - The URL for a link can now be generated by an external UNIX command. 3.2 _H_T_M_L__t_a_g_s__a_n_d__W_Y_S_I_W_Y_G_-_n_e_s_s +o Cosmo Create now supports the HTML tags FONT COLOR and NBSP (non-breaking space). Also supported are the EMBED and APPLET tags. +o Named HTML colors are now supported in addition to RGB colors. +o The TARGET link attribute is now supported. - 4 - +o Plain FORM Button - INPUT TYPE="BUTTON" is now supported by the Form Tool. +o Textarea Wrapping - The TEXTAREA WRAP attribute is now supported by the Form Tool. +o Improved Alignment - LEFT and RIGHT aligned images are now shown WYSIWYG. Inlines can now be aligned TEXTTOP, ABSMIDDLE and ABSBOTTOM in addition to the normal alignment parameters. +o Alternate HTML - Certain tags such as the APPLET tag allow the author to specify alternate HTML, which is now viewable through a mode switch in the View menu. +o Scrolling Backgrounds - Background images now scroll when you scroll the page. Also, the background image field has been split into two fields: one for the local file and one for the published URL. +o JPEG and PNG - Cosmo Create now supports WYSIWYG inlining of progressive JPEG and PNG images. 3.3 _H_o_t__C_o_n_t_e_n_t_:__F_e_t_c_h__P_a_g_e_s__f_r_o_m__t_h_e__W_e_b +o This feature enables you to enter a URL into Cosmo Create and fetch the page from the web, provided the preferences are filled out appropriately (see "Setting up Hot Content", below). There are three ways to get a URL into Cosmo Create: 1. Type a URL into the File->Open dialog (See "Browse Feature" below) 2. Drag a WebJumper into the File->Open dialog 3. Enter a URL as a command line argument Any of the above actions will cause Cosmo Create to attempt to fetch the page from the web. Press "Cancel" in the "Progress:" dialog to stop the download. +o Setting up Hot Content - Cosmo Create will attempt to acquire the network preferences from Netscape. If your netscape is correctly set up to get outside the firewall, Cosmo Create should be able to do the same. In the event that Netscape is not properly configured, you must go to File->Preferences Proxy tab panel and fill in the SOCKS and PROXY information accordingly. Check with your system administrator if you are not - 5 - certain about the value of these fields. +o Browse Feature - The File->Open dialog, as well as the dialogs popped up from any of the "Browse" buttons, is a mini web browser. Entering a URL into this dialog will cause the "Filter" button to change to say "Follow". Pressing the "Follow" button will cause Cosmo Create to commence fetching the URL currently in the text field and will display the links, and inline objects in the file list. To traverse another link, select one from the list, and again, press "Follow". Pressing OK will cause the value from the text field to be returned to the dialog from which the browser was popped up. Pressing Apply in that dialog will cause the inline image, background image, or other web reference to be fetched into the document. +o Saving inline images along with the HTML - Cosmo Create allows the saving of inline images in the same directory as the HTML for web fetched pages. To use this feature, open the URL via any of the above methods, modify the resultant page in some way. When the warning dialog pops up, make sure the checkbox for saving inline content along with the page is checked, then click Save to save the page. The images will get written into the same directory as the HTML. 3.4 __C_h_a_n_g_e_s__a_n_d__A_d_d_i_t_i_o_n_s__i_n__C_o_s_m_o__C_r_e_a_t_e__1_._0_._2 +o A "WYSIWYG Tables" item has been added to the View menu. When this is turned off, tables are displayed using graphical icons to represent the individual HTML table tags, and the table itself is not drawn. This isn't as pretty, but it is sometimes desirable for speed. +o Cosmo Create 1.0.2 now provides Chinese language support. +o Pressing Save in the Preferences dialog now applies the preferences to the current editing session in addition to saving them. +o Whether palettes raise with the document window is now a user settable preference. - 6 - 3.5 _C_h_a_n_g_e_s__a_n_d__A_d_d_i_t_i_o_n_s__i_n__C_o_s_m_o__C_r_e_a_t_e__1_._0_._3 +o To specify an empty VALUE attribute in a form OPTION or INPUT tag, enter "" in the value field of the form dialog. +o The Delete and Backspace keys can now be used when editing frames to delete the selected frame(s). +o Cosmo Create now uses an explicit keyboard focus policy instead of a pointer focus policy. This means that you must explicitly click in a text field or editing area to set the keyboard focus for data entry. This change brings Cosmo Create into compliance with the SGI IRIX Interactive Style Guide and will make editing within text fields more convenient. +o Selection of form components is now much easier. A text field or text area can be selected by simply clicking on the component. Similarly, a toggle, option or push button is selected by pressing on it and a list component is selected by pressing on one of the list entries. +o The Cosmo Create editing window's position on the screen and its size are now preserved between runs of the program. +o The View Menu settings are now automatically preserved between runs of the program. Previously, these settings were only saved when the program preferences were saved. +o Empty lines that are ignored by browsers are now indicated by both changing the end-of-paragraph symbol (the paragraph symbol enclosed in square brackets), and by displaying a message in the editing window status bar. +o A set of HTML tag reference pages has been added to the help documentation. These pages provide detailed information about which browsers support which HTML elements, attributes and values. +o Detailed HTML tag reference information can be obtained for any tag in the Source editing window by positioning the cursor over the tag and either selecting the Lookup HTML Tag item on the Edit or right-mouse popup menues or by pressing Ctrl+F1. - 7 - +o Instead of using proprietary HTML comments, Cosmo Create now uses the more conventional META tag with the NAME="Generator" attribute to identify itself in HTML output. +o Cosmo Create now provides user tips on startup.