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