175 lines
10 KiB
HTML
175 lines
10 KiB
HTML
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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
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<HTML><HEAD>
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<title>The Quanta HTML Editor LG #56</title>
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<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#0000AF"
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ALINK="#FF0000">
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<A HREF="http://www.linuxgazette.com/">
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<H1><IMG ALT="LINUX GAZETTE" SRC="../gx/lglogo.jpg"
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WIDTH="600" HEIGHT="124" border="0"></H1></A>
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<IMG ALT="" SRC="../gx/navbar/left.jpg" WIDTH="14" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"><A HREF="orr.html"><IMG ALT="[ Prev ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/prev.jpg" WIDTH="16" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="index.html"><IMG ALT="[ Table of Contents ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/toc.jpg" WIDTH="220" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><A HREF="../index.html"><IMG ALT="[ Front Page ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/frontpage.jpg" WIDTH="137" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="http://www.linuxgazette.com/cgi-bin/talkback/all.py?site=LG&article=http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue56/skjoldebrand.html"><IMG ALT="[ Talkback ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/talkback.jpg" WIDTH="121" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><A HREF="../faq/index.html"><IMG ALT="[ FAQ ]" SRC="./../gx/navbar/faq.jpg"WIDTH="62" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="wreski.html"><IMG ALT="[ Next ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/next.jpg" WIDTH="15" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><IMG ALT="" SRC="../gx/navbar/right.jpg" WIDTH="15" HEIGHT="45" ALIGN="bottom">
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<H4 ALIGN="center">
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"Linux Gazette...<I>making Linux just a little more fun!</I>"
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</H4>
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<P> <HR> <P>
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<H1><font color="maroon">The Quanta HTML Editor</font></H1>
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<H4>By <a href="mailto:chimbis@skjoldebrand.org">Martin Skjøldenrand</a></H4>
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<P> <HR> <P>
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<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
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[This is part III in a series on HTML editors.
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<A HREF="../issue46/skjoldebrand.html">Part I</A> focused on CoffeeCup's
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HTML Editor ++. <A HREF="../issue55/skjoldebrand.html">Part II</A> was about
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Bluefish. -Ed.]
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</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>
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<p>This will conclude my look into HTML editors for now. I've gotten a few questions about other
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HTML editors and I'll look at one of them in this article. There are lot's of
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HTML editors out there - many of which I haven't used at all, or recently. A
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few seem unmaintained (like asWedit, Ashe) and frankly I find little point in
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using unmaintained and quite limited software when there are very good
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alternatives. Which leeds us on to .... </p>
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<h2>Quanta</h2> <h3><a
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href="http://quanta.sourceforge.net">http://quanta.sourceforge.net</a></h3>
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<h3>v 1.0</h3>
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<p>OK - I cheated I grabbed a rpm on the quanta site and installed from there. No problems at all it just
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slipped in to my Mandrake machine. Just like an install should behave. First thing that meets the eye is
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that Quanta follows the new standard of tabbed tool palettes instead of multiple button rows. This is
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definately a Good Thing (TM) as otherwise the button rows easily grab too much
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screen real estate. The palettes are more limited than those in Bluefish
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lacking CSS and PHP "wizards" to name two.</p>
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<p>Another thing that meets my
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eye is a problem with all KDE applications. It's ugly. Yes, a wholy subjective
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notion I agree but nevertheless visual impressions play some part in forming
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an opinion about a piece of software. That said I think that some of the tool
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buttons are better than those found on (e.g.) Bluefish.</p> <p>A third pretty
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obvious feature of Quanta, one which I like, is the directory tree on the left
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hand side of the screen. Double-clicking a file in the tree opens it in the
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editor screen. I miss this in Bluefish. There is no drag-and-drop between the
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directory tree and the editor screen though.</p>
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<h4>Writing and editing text</h4>
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<p>I will turn to a couple of thing that has been bugging me about Quanta in the past - and there still
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is a problem in this respect. Firstly - how do I make the editing screen wrap lines? Continuing this
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line for more than what's visible produces a very long line. This is the
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standard setting, which in my humble opinion is dumb. I found the wrap
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lines settings is Options/Editor Options. So that is a problem less. The
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second irritant is that the default font for Quanta is Courier, a serif
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font set a 12 pt. Two things about this, I think most people agree now
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that a sans-serif font is best for the screen, and a serif font, if
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acceptable, <b>is</b> hard to read at 12 pt on a 1024x768 screen.
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Changing the setting to 14 pt Clean is OK for me. Just noticed that
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writing this sentence and formating "is" as bold re-formated the
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display. Now I get much smaller margin for writing. Weird. Apparently what
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happened was that the word wrap doesn't take hold until another tag has
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been completed.</p>
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<div align="center"><img src="misc/skjoldebrand/quanta.png" alt="Quanta running under KDE 1.1.2" width=512 height=319 border=0></div>
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<p>Minor irritants as these migh be, a thing that is a
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problem, and seems to be a bigger one at that, is the handling of extended
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ASCII. Opening a page written in Swedish you might be excused to believe
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that some kind of DOS virus has mirculously struck in Linux. Where there
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once was beautiful extended characters like ä and ö there is
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white space. This is because Quanta does a "on-the-fly" translation of
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these characters to the entities equivalents. But - this feature is only
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one way. If you've written a page full of extended characters Quanta isn't
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smart enough to translate these when opening the page. And, to make
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matters worse - the entity translation is buggy. It manages ä and ö
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but fails on å and ü, handling the latter as seperate dots and
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the letter u.</p>
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<p>To end this section on a possitive note there is context sensitive help
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and in place tag editing. Highlighting a tag and then pressing the right
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mouse button you get a context menu including context help, tag attributes
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and tag edit. For the two latter you select either and simply fill in your
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attributes. Quanta does the rest. Neat. Selecting context help naturally
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opens the relevant passage in the hypertext HTML reference document. Which
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goes to prove that the best Linux HTML editors are catching up with
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HomeSite. Next evolutionary step would be linux-questions-only@ssc.completion where you (even
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more simply) type SPACE within a tag and get a list of attributes to
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select, and so on.</p>
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<h4>Document preview</h4> A neat feature of Quanta is
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the possibility to have a preview of the page you are working with
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unfortunately this is not a real-time feature but seems rather to be a
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snapshot of the document as some time in the past. When doing this review I've
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had problems in getting Quanta to understand that I want a preview of another
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page. Loading a page brings you the preview of that page. Loading another and
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making it active changes the preview. Here the problems start. Changing
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between the loaded documents doesn't change the preview. Nor does unloading
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the document that is previewed. The only way to refresh the review window
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(I've found) is to exit Quanta and reload the documents. <h4>The lefthand
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frame</h4> <p>To do Quanta justice I must mention the left hand frame once
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more. In it you have four separe tabs. The default shows you the complete
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directory tree, although why it doesn't default to the working directory is
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beyond me. It is very useful for quickly finding your files wherever they may
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be. You've got a Struct tab which shows you the structure of the document you
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are working with, broken down into separate major tags like P, IMG and Hx.
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Clicking on one of those brings you to that place in the doc. Neat and useful.
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Even neater would be if you could drag those tags around and thereby rearrange
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the document in the editor. Perhaps in some future version. The fourth tag is
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for HTML documentation. It is hyperlinked document providing all the
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information you might ever need for writing correct HTML 4 documents. There is
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also a tab for Project management - which I haven't used for this review.</p>
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<h4>Summary</h4>
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<p>There has been some time since I looked at Quanta and I must admit to
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being a bit impressed at the progress of the editor.All in all Quanta
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is a very nice HTML editor, very powerfull but with a major bug for
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non-English users that rely on extended ASCII for their webpages. I've also
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found somewhat more minor irritants in Quanta than when using Bluefish.</p>
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<p>File handling, document structure and HTML documentation, is very
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impressive and something that I miss in Bluefish. It might be enough to
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give Quanta a lead over the latter for those that are not dependent on
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extended characters for their documents.
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<!-- *** BEGIN copyright *** -->
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<P> <hr> <!-- P -->
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<H5 ALIGN=center>
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Copyright © 2000, Martin Skjøldenrand<BR>
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Published in Issue 56 of <i>Linux Gazette</i>, August 2000</H5>
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<HR><P>
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<CENTER>
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<IMG ALT="" SRC="../gx/navbar/left.jpg" WIDTH="14" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"><A HREF="orr.html"><IMG ALT="[ Prev ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/prev.jpg" WIDTH="16" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="index.html"><IMG ALT="[ Table of Contents ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/toc.jpg" WIDTH="220" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><A HREF="../index.html"><IMG ALT="[ Front Page ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/frontpage.jpg" WIDTH="137" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="http://www.linuxgazette.com/cgi-bin/talkback/all.py?site=LG&article=http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue56/skjoldebrand.html"><IMG ALT="[ Talkback ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/talkback.jpg" WIDTH="121" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><A HREF="../faq/index.html"><IMG ALT="[ FAQ ]" SRC="./../gx/navbar/faq.jpg"WIDTH="62" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="wreski.html"><IMG ALT="[ Next ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/next.jpg" WIDTH="15" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><IMG ALT="" SRC="../gx/navbar/right.jpg" WIDTH="15" HEIGHT="45" ALIGN="bottom">
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