Additions:
Editing Images
If you've got an image in your document that you'd like to edit, check out this page to find out how.
Edited on 2008-04-01 15:54:12 by BradEllis
Additions:
Editing text is easy (or tremendously difficult, depending on what you're doing) but let's talk about controlling your text, and getting it to do what you want it to do. Click on one of the helpful topics below. Have something else you're looking to find out about? Try checking the Tips and Tricks section or send us an email∞.
Adding a Ruler
Put a ruler on your page, the first step to controlling your text
Controlling Paragraphs
Start controlling your paragraphs
Alignment
Get things lined up the way you want
Font and Color
Not a fan of 12.0pt Helvetica Black? Learn how to change it.
Background Color
We can't all have white backgrounds, think of the power you'll save by switching it
Creating Text Styles
Fond of a certain font? Set it up as a Text Style for easy access
Tabs
Get those decimal points lining up, start controlling your tabs
Tables
Not something to rest cups on, these are powerful grids for text and numbers
Back to VoodooPad
Deletions:
Although it's much more, VoodooPad is a text editor at its foundation. Even the page of text that appears when you open the application can be edited, just click somewhere in the middle of a sentence and start typing. You'll find that VoodooPad performs the same way most text editors behave on your Mac.
Lets start our example by manipulating our paragraphs. We'll start by choosing the menu item Edit->Select All which will select all of the text on the page. Before we can change text that is already written on the page, it has to be selected. With our text selected, let's continue by displaying the Text Ruler and formating our paragraphs.
Choose the menu item Format->Text->Show Ruler
A text ruler should appear at the top of the page, like this, which will allow you to format the paragraphs.
Notice a triangle pointing downward with a short bar over it at the left edge of the ruler.
If you click on the bar (not the triangle) and drag it one quarter inch to the right, it separates from the triangle and forms a "T".
This is used to set the indentation for any selected paragraphs. Notice that you've just indented all the paragraphs on this page.
There's much more to text editing, but VoodooPad generally uses the text editing capabilities built into MacOS X. If you're not familiar with the richness associated with such text editing capabilities, you can open TextEdit and choose Help->TextEdit Help for help with most of those text editing capabilities. We've also included a couple topics at the end of this tutorial if you would like to explore the text editing facilities in greater depth.
Our purpose here, however, is to help you learn how VoodooPad can help you organize your mind, so let's do a couple more fun things.
Creating Pages
Creating new pages in VoodooPad is simple and a powerful tool for organizing your mind.Notice in your document that the word, VoodooPad is highlighted and underlined just like a link in a web browser. That's because it is a link. Just click on it and you will be taken to a new page within VoodooPad.
The first interesting thing about clicking on that word is that the page you are taken to didn't exist until you clicked. When you did so, VoodooPad looked for a page by that name, and when unable to find it, created a new page with the sentence "Write about VoodooPad here." at the top.
In general, when creating a new page, it will automatically say "Write about it here." at the top, however this is changeable if you want. If you're interested, read more about Page Templates.
Lets experiment with creating new pages a little more. Start typing in VoodooPad and write something like "VoodooPad has shown that it clearly differs from TextEdit." The minute you've completed the word "TextEdit" you'll notice that the word will underline as a link as well. Any word with a capital letter in the middle will automatically become a link.
Now, click the Back button on the top left of the toolbar and you will be taken back to the first page that was opened. We will call this first page the homepage from now on, and clicking the "Home" button on the toolbar will always take you back to this page. You'll notice that here are a lot of VoodooPad links on the homepage, every single one of these will all link to the exact same VoodooPad page. In fact, if you ever write "VoodooPad" again, it will link to that page.
VoodooPad will also allow you to link to sites outside of the VoodooPad document, you'll notice at the bottom of the homepage there is a link to Flying Meat's web site http://www.flyingmeat.com∞ clicking a link to a website will automatically open up your default web browser and take you to the link.
You aren't limited to pages online or in your document, however. By dragging a file from Finder into your VoodooPad document you can make a link to that file. Navigate to a file on your computer somewhere, there are no requirements for what kind of file you find.
We won't be using the document you just modified, so you're welcome to close it either by clicking the red Close button in the top left corner of the window or by choosing the File->Close or its keyboard equivalent, Cmd-w.
Doing so should display a sheet indicating that you've made changes to the document and asking what you would like to do. We would suggest clicking the Don't Save button.
As we mentioned earlier, text editing in VoodooPad is very similar to editing the text in a Rich Text document using TextEdit (and most other rich text editors on the Mac). However, because the rich text features of the Mac's text system are more similar to a word processor than to a simple text editor, we'll review a few of these features to be sure you're aware of their availability in VoodooPad.
On the other hand, because most of this functionality is so basic to Mac OS X, we'll make use of the hyperlinking capability of VoodooPad to reference much of this topic so you can move through it quickly if it's already familiar. If you see an editing capability referenced followed by the parenthesized note: "see edit details", simply click on the edit details link. The resulting page will have a link back to this one.
Open a new VoodooPad document by choosing File->New Document, or by pressing Shft-Cmd-N on the keyboard. When the the new window opens you should see the same document, with the heading: "VoodooPad, You put your brain in it." that you saw the last time we created a new VoodooPad document.
Letter, Word and Paragraph Selection
We can select a letter, word or paragraph by clicking and dragging across them. Dragging across letters contains no surprises (see edit details). Doing so allows us to demonstrate text resizing on individual letters in a word (see edit details).
Notice the ease with which you can precisely select words by double clicking on the first and dragging across more (see edit details). We can also add to existing text properties in a selection (see edit details).
Finally, a paragraph is most easily selected by triple clicking and multiple paragraphs are easily selected by triple clicking and dragging (see edit details).
Multiple Undo
As with most things Macintosh, we can undo what we've done by choosing Edit->Undo or pressing the Cmd-z keys. In fact, if we press Cmd-z often enough, or simply hold it down for a few seconds, we can undo all the changes we've just made on this page.
Font Properties
Triple click to select the first paragraph of the page. Now choose Format->Font->Strike Out. We can undo the strike outs by pressing Cmd-z or by choosing Format->Font->Strike Out again while the strike out text is still selected.
Click on the Format menu item and drag to the Font item to see its submenu. Notice the things you can do directly from this menu:
• Bold, Italic, Strike Out, Underline to change font properties
• Bigger, Smaller to incrementally increase or decrease the selected text size
• Kern to spread letters apart or compress them horizontally
• Ligature to add ligatures used in your font
• Baseline to raise or lower the baseline of selected text
…and so forth.
Feel free to play with these properties if you're not familiar with them. In particular, with some text selected, choose Underline. Notice that rather than underlining the text, VoodooPad instead displays this panel:
The reason for this preference is that VoodooPad uses both underlining and text color to indicate links. It can be difficult to determine which underlined words really represent links if non-link words and phrases are also underlined and/or colored. Use the application's Preferences panel to change from the default with care.
With the first paragraph still selected, choose Format->Font->Show Fonts to bring up the Font pallette. This allows us to choose a new font for the selected text, change it's size and many other of it's properties.
To create the perception of lifting some text off the page, for instance, try clicking on the rectangle centered directly under the "Font" title of the Font pallette. To confirm that you've selected the correct rectangle, just hold the mouse pointer on the rectangle for a few moments until a tool tip pops up indicating that this is the Text Shadow rectangle. If it says something else, try again.
With the first paragraph selected when this rectangle is activated, the text in the paragraph will display shadows for each character. Directly to the right of the rectangle are three sliders, slide the first about 2/3 of the way towards the right, slide the second about 1/8 from the left and slide the third about 3/4 of the way toward the right.
As you do this, notice how the text seems to lift off the page. You can also click and drag the small indentation in the circle to the right of the third slider. As you do this, you'll see an apparent shift of the virtual light illuminating the text to cast the shadows at a changing angle.
Font Colors
You can also choose Format->Font->Show Colors to display the color pallette. However, like underlining, by default you will not be able to change text colors. Choose VoodooPad->Preferences… and select the Appearance tab to change this default behavior.
Text Alignment and the Ruler
In our overview, we touched on the text ruler. Triple click on the third paragraph to select the entire paragraph and bring the ruler up again by choosing Format->Text->Show Ruler.
The text ruler is primarily used for setting page margins, paragraph indentation, tabs and alignment or justification. It also has pop-down menus for selecting line spacing, bullet point styles and an alternate means of selecting font properties.
With the third paragraph still selected, click on the third tab in the ruler tab bar that looks like this:
This should justify (or straighten the edges of) the paragraph on both sides. Now select the document title, "You put your brain in it." and click the far left of the four tabs to left justify the title.
Setting Tabs
As a final demonstration of VoodooPad's standard text editing features, let's set some tab stops. First be sure that the VoodooPad window is wide enough by looking for the red Delete icon in the far right side of window's tool bar. If the far right icon is not the red Delete icon, then drag the lower right corner of the window to the right until red Delete icon appears.
Next scroll to the bottom of the page and click to place the text insertion bar at the very end of the text. Press the Return key a couple times to make some room. Then type in the following text. Note that as you do so, space each word or number from the others by a single tab:
Be sure that you've entered no spaces but only a single tab between each word or number. Then select all of the text in those five lines. With all five lines selected, go to the text ruler at the top of the window and drag all the tab stops that are to the left of the 5" mark out of the ruler. Don't worry if words or numbers in the five lines we've selected seem to go a bit berserk. We'll bring order to them shortly.
Look for the tab stop well at the far right of the ruler which looks like this:
Put your mouse pointer on each of the icons in the tab stop well for a couple seconds until a tool tips label appears. You should see that they are called from left to right respectively, the "Left tab stop", the "Center tab stop", the "Right tab stop" and the "Decimal tab stop".
Now drag a left tab stop from the tab stop well to the ruler and drop it at the top of the 3/4" mark. Next drag a Center tab stop from the well and drop it on the 2 1/4" mark. Next drag a Decimal tab stop from the well and drop it on the 3 1/4" mark. Finally, drag a Decimal tab stop from the well and drop it on the 4 1/4" mark.
If you've done this correctly, your five lines should now look like this:
Notice that the words in the Item column are left justified in the column. The numbers in the Quantity column are centered and the money amounts in the Price and Amount columns are aligned on their decimal points. Also notice a couple weaknesses in our formatting: the numbers in the number column should probably be centered in the column and the headers for the Price and Amount columns are right justified on the Decimal tab stops for each of those columns.
We could clean this up a bit by using different tab stops for the heading line then we used in the item and total lines, and by centering the numbers in the Number column, but we've demonstrated how the tab stops can be used and that was our objective in this tutorial.
If the resulting columnar list makes you uncomfortable, feel free to clean it up by inserting a tab at the left end of each of the last four lines, selecting only those four lines and adding a Center tab stop at the 1/4" mark. You can also select only the header line and replace the two Decimal tab stops there with two left tab stops placed at the 3" and the 4" marks. If you decide to do that, your result should look as follows:
But wait a minute, you say… the price for VoodooPad and FlySketch are $39.95, not $19.95! However, we reply, if you buy them in quantities of two or more, they're only $19.95 each.
Edited on 2008-02-08 12:38:05 by BradEllis
Additions:
Now, click the Back button on the top left of the toolbar and you will be taken back to the first page that was opened. We will call this first page the homepage from now on, and clicking the "Home" button on the toolbar will always take you back to this page. You'll notice that here are a lot of VoodooPad links on the homepage, every single one of these will all link to the exact same VoodooPad page. In fact, if you ever write "VoodooPad" again, it will link to that page.
VoodooPad will also allow you to link to sites outside of the VoodooPad document, you'll notice at the bottom of the homepage there is a link to Flying Meat's web site http://www.flyingmeat.com∞ clicking a link to a website will automatically open up your default web browser and take you to the link.
You aren't limited to pages online or in your document, however. By dragging a file from Finder into your VoodooPad document you can make a link to that file. Navigate to a file on your computer somewhere, there are no requirements for what kind of file you find.
Deletions:
Now, click the Back button on the top left of the toolbar and you will be taken back to the first page that was opened. We will call this first page the homepage from now on. You'll notice that here are a lot of VoodooPad links on the homepage, every single one of these will all link to the exact same VoodooPad page. In fact, if you ever write "VoodooPad" again, it will link to that page.
VoodooPad will also allow you to link to sites outside of the VoodooPad document, you'll notice at the bottom of the homepage there is a link to Flying Meat's web site ( http://www.flyingmeat.com/∞ )
Of course, not all links in VoodooPad are links to pages within the VoodooPad document. VoodooPad can distinguish real web links and will act appropriately.
To see this, go back to the Home page and scroll to the bottom where you will see a link to the VoodooPad web site ( http://www.flyingmeat.com/∞ ) in the second to last paragraph. When you click on that link, your browser will open and take you to the Flying Meat home page, the makers of this and other useful desktop tools for your Mac.
VoodooPad can be very intelligent about links and recognize them as they are typed in. As a final exercise in this topic, again go to the bottom of the text in the Home page and click on the TextEdit link. Add a space and the following after your name on the page: "http://www.apple.com"∞. Notice that as soon as you type it in, it becomes a link. Click on the link and your browser will once again open and take you to the Apple home page.
Edited on 2008-02-07 14:48:59 by BradEllis
Additions:
Now, click the Back button on the top left of the toolbar and you will be taken back to the first page that was opened. We will call this first page the homepage from now on. You'll notice that here are a lot of VoodooPad links on the homepage, every single one of these will all link to the exact same VoodooPad page. In fact, if you ever write "VoodooPad" again, it will link to that page.
VoodooPad will also allow you to link to sites outside of the VoodooPad document, you'll notice at the bottom of the homepage there is a link to Flying Meat's web site ( http://www.flyingmeat.com/∞ )
Deletions:
Now, click the Back button on the top left of the toolbar and you will be taken back to the first page that was opened. We will call this first page the homepage from now on. You'll notice that here are lots of VoodooPad links on the homepage, every single one of these will all link to the exact same VoodooPad page
We will refer to this first page as the Home page from now on. Once again, click on the word VoodooPad anywhere else in the Home page and you will be taken back to the VoodooPad page to see the additional text you added. This demonstrates that you're going to the same VoodooPad page from any VoodooPad link.
Once again, click on the Home page of VoodooPad and click to put the insertion bar at the very bottom of the page. Press the Return key twice and add the words, "TextEdit and more." Notice that the word, "TextEdit" has again been highlighted. Click on it and confirm that VoodooPad takes you to the same TextEdit page that was created by linking from your second page where you added your name.
Edited on 2008-02-07 14:29:33 by BradEllis
Additions:
Lets experiment with creating new pages a little more. Start typing in VoodooPad and write something like "VoodooPad has shown that it clearly differs from TextEdit." The minute you've completed the word "TextEdit" you'll notice that the word will underline as a link as well. Any word with a capital letter in the middle will automatically become a link.
Now, click the Back button on the top left of the toolbar and you will be taken back to the first page that was opened. We will call this first page the homepage from now on. You'll notice that here are lots of VoodooPad links on the homepage, every single one of these will all link to the exact same VoodooPad page
We will refer to this first page as the Home page from now on. Once again, click on the word VoodooPad anywhere else in the Home page and you will be taken back to the VoodooPad page to see the additional text you added. This demonstrates that you're going to the same VoodooPad page from any VoodooPad link.
Deletions:
In order to see this in action, click at the end of the sentence on the new page and press the Return key twice to enter an empty line. Now type (or copy from this page) the words, "VoodooPad has shown that it clearly differs from TextEdit." As you do this, notice that the word "TextEdit" displays as a link as well.
Now click on the new TextEdit link and another new page will be created as we described. Add your name to this new page to make it unique.
Now, click the Back button at the very top of the new page twice and you will be taken back to the first page that was opened. We will refer to this first page as the Home page from now on. Once again, click on the word VoodooPad anywhere else in the Home page and you will be taken back to the VoodooPad page to see the additional text you added. This demonstrates that you're going to the same VoodooPad page from any VoodooPad link.
Edited on 2008-02-07 14:00:07 by BradEllis
Additions:
Lets start our example by manipulating our paragraphs. We'll start by choosing the menu item Edit->Select All which will select all of the text on the page. Before we can change text that is already written on the page, it has to be selected. With our text selected, let's continue by displaying the Text Ruler and formating our paragraphs.
Choose the menu item Format->Text->Show Ruler
A text ruler should appear at the top of the page, like this, which will allow you to format the paragraphs.
Notice a triangle pointing downward with a short bar over it at the left edge of the ruler.
Creating Pages
Creating new pages in VoodooPad is simple and a powerful tool for organizing your mind.Notice in your document that the word, VoodooPad is highlighted and underlined just like a link in a web browser. That's because it is a link. Just click on it and you will be taken to a new page within VoodooPad.
The first interesting thing about clicking on that word is that the page you are taken to didn't exist until you clicked. When you did so, VoodooPad looked for a page by that name, and when unable to find it, created a new page with the sentence "Write about VoodooPad here." at the top.
In general, when creating a new page, it will automatically say "Write about it here." at the top, however this is changeable if you want. If you're interested, read more about Page Templates.
Deletions:
We are also going to call the area in which you edit text on your document the work area and the top part with all the buttons the toolbar.
Lets start our tutorial by displaying the Text Ruler and formating our paragraphs.
Start by choosing the menu item Format->Text->Show Ruler
A text ruler should appear at the top of the page, like this which will allow you to format the paragraphs.
In short, on the surface, VoodooPad behaves very much like the Apple TextEdit program when TextEdit is in Rich Text mode. Like TextEdit, we can display the Text Ruler and format our paragraphs.
To do this, click just before the first word of the first paragraph in the Work Area and drag all the way to the bottom of the last paragraph. That is, select all the text of the page except the graphic at the top and the heading. Now choose the menu item Format->Text->Show Ruler.
A text ruler should appear at the top of the page, like this
which will allow you to format the paragraphs. Notice a triangle pointing downward with a short bar over it at the left edge of the ruler.
Notice in your document that the word, VoodooPad is highlighted and underlined just like a link in a web browser. That's because it is a link. Just click on it and you will be taken to a new page within VoodooPad.
The first interesting thing about clicking on that word is that the page you are taken to didn't exist until you clicked. When you did so, VoodooPad looked for a page for that alias, and when unable to find it, created a new page with the sentence "Write about VoodooPad here." at the top.
In general, when a new page is created for a link, the default format is to put a similar sentence at the top of an empty page that mentions the word (or phrase) you clicked, as follows:
"Write about here."
Edited on 2008-02-06 16:47:01 by BradEllis
Additions:
We are also going to call the area in which you edit text on your document the work area and the top part with all the buttons the toolbar.
Although it's much more, VoodooPad is a text editor at its foundation. Even the page of text that appears when you open the application can be edited, just click somewhere in the middle of a sentence and start typing. You'll find that VoodooPad performs the same way most text editors behave on your Mac.
Lets start our tutorial by displaying the Text Ruler and formating our paragraphs.
Start by choosing the menu item Format->Text->Show Ruler
A text ruler should appear at the top of the page, like this which will allow you to format the paragraphs.
Edited on 2008-02-06 15:59:10 by BradEllis
Additions:
Edited on 2008-02-06 15:57:13 by BradEllis
Additions:
Editing Text
In short, on the surface, VoodooPad behaves very much like the Apple TextEdit program when TextEdit is in Rich Text mode. Like TextEdit, we can display the Text Ruler and format our paragraphs.To do this, click just before the first word of the first paragraph in the Work Area and drag all the way to the bottom of the last paragraph. That is, select all the text of the page except the graphic at the top and the heading. Now choose the menu item Format->Text->Show Ruler.
A text ruler should appear at the top of the page, like this
which will allow you to format the paragraphs. Notice a triangle pointing downward with a short bar over it at the left edge of the ruler.
If you click on the bar (not the triangle) and drag it one quarter inch to the right, it separates from the triangle and forms a "T".
This is used to set the indentation for any selected paragraphs. Notice that you've just indented all the paragraphs on this page.
There's much more to text editing, but VoodooPad generally uses the text editing capabilities built into MacOS X. If you're not familiar with the richness associated with such text editing capabilities, you can open TextEdit and choose Help->TextEdit Help for help with most of those text editing capabilities. We've also included a couple topics at the end of this tutorial if you would like to explore the text editing facilities in greater depth.
Our purpose here, however, is to help you learn how VoodooPad can help you organize your mind, so let's do a couple more fun things.
Notice in your document that the word, VoodooPad is highlighted and underlined just like a link in a web browser. That's because it is a link. Just click on it and you will be taken to a new page within VoodooPad.
The first interesting thing about clicking on that word is that the page you are taken to didn't exist until you clicked. When you did so, VoodooPad looked for a page for that alias, and when unable to find it, created a new page with the sentence "Write about VoodooPad here." at the top.
In general, when a new page is created for a link, the default format is to put a similar sentence at the top of an empty page that mentions the word (or phrase) you clicked, as follows:
"Write about here."
In order to see this in action, click at the end of the sentence on the new page and press the Return key twice to enter an empty line. Now type (or copy from this page) the words, "VoodooPad has shown that it clearly differs from TextEdit." As you do this, notice that the word "TextEdit" displays as a link as well.
Now click on the new TextEdit link and another new page will be created as we described. Add your name to this new page to make it unique.
Now, click the Back button at the very top of the new page twice and you will be taken back to the first page that was opened. We will refer to this first page as the Home page from now on. Once again, click on the word VoodooPad anywhere else in the Home page and you will be taken back to the VoodooPad page to see the additional text you added. This demonstrates that you're going to the same VoodooPad page from any VoodooPad link.
Once again, click on the Home page of VoodooPad and click to put the insertion bar at the very bottom of the page. Press the Return key twice and add the words, "TextEdit and more." Notice that the word, "TextEdit" has again been highlighted. Click on it and confirm that VoodooPad takes you to the same TextEdit page that was created by linking from your second page where you added your name.
Of course, not all links in VoodooPad are links to pages within the VoodooPad document. VoodooPad can distinguish real web links and will act appropriately.
To see this, go back to the Home page and scroll to the bottom where you will see a link to the VoodooPad web site ( http://www.flyingmeat.com/∞ ) in the second to last paragraph. When you click on that link, your browser will open and take you to the Flying Meat home page, the makers of this and other useful desktop tools for your Mac.
VoodooPad can be very intelligent about links and recognize them as they are typed in. As a final exercise in this topic, again go to the bottom of the text in the Home page and click on the TextEdit link. Add a space and the following after your name on the page: "http://www.apple.com"∞. Notice that as soon as you type it in, it becomes a link. Click on the link and your browser will once again open and take you to the Apple home page.
We won't be using the document you just modified, so you're welcome to close it either by clicking the red Close button in the top left corner of the window or by choosing the File->Close or its keyboard equivalent, Cmd-w.
Doing so should display a sheet indicating that you've made changes to the document and asking what you would like to do. We would suggest clicking the Don't Save button.
Deletions:
Editing Text
Edited on 2008-01-30 16:53:25 by BradEllis
Additions:
Editing Text
As we mentioned earlier, text editing in VoodooPad is very similar to editing the text in a Rich Text document using TextEdit (and most other rich text editors on the Mac). However, because the rich text features of the Mac's text system are more similar to a word processor than to a simple text editor, we'll review a few of these features to be sure you're aware of their availability in VoodooPad.
On the other hand, because most of this functionality is so basic to Mac OS X, we'll make use of the hyperlinking capability of VoodooPad to reference much of this topic so you can move through it quickly if it's already familiar. If you see an editing capability referenced followed by the parenthesized note: "see edit details", simply click on the edit details link. The resulting page will have a link back to this one.
Open a new VoodooPad document by choosing File->New Document, or by pressing Shft-Cmd-N on the keyboard. When the the new window opens you should see the same document, with the heading: "VoodooPad, You put your brain in it." that you saw the last time we created a new VoodooPad document.
Letter, Word and Paragraph Selection
We can select a letter, word or paragraph by clicking and dragging across them. Dragging across letters contains no surprises (see edit details). Doing so allows us to demonstrate text resizing on individual letters in a word (see edit details).
Notice the ease with which you can precisely select words by double clicking on the first and dragging across more (see edit details). We can also add to existing text properties in a selection (see edit details).
Finally, a paragraph is most easily selected by triple clicking and multiple paragraphs are easily selected by triple clicking and dragging (see edit details).
Multiple Undo
As with most things Macintosh, we can undo what we've done by choosing Edit->Undo or pressing the Cmd-z keys. In fact, if we press Cmd-z often enough, or simply hold it down for a few seconds, we can undo all the changes we've just made on this page.
Font Properties
Triple click to select the first paragraph of the page. Now choose Format->Font->Strike Out. We can undo the strike outs by pressing Cmd-z or by choosing Format->Font->Strike Out again while the strike out text is still selected.
Click on the Format menu item and drag to the Font item to see its submenu. Notice the things you can do directly from this menu:
• Bold, Italic, Strike Out, Underline to change font properties
• Bigger, Smaller to incrementally increase or decrease the selected text size
• Kern to spread letters apart or compress them horizontally
• Ligature to add ligatures used in your font
• Baseline to raise or lower the baseline of selected text
…and so forth.
Feel free to play with these properties if you're not familiar with them. In particular, with some text selected, choose Underline. Notice that rather than underlining the text, VoodooPad instead displays this panel:
The reason for this preference is that VoodooPad uses both underlining and text color to indicate links. It can be difficult to determine which underlined words really represent links if non-link words and phrases are also underlined and/or colored. Use the application's Preferences panel to change from the default with care.
With the first paragraph still selected, choose Format->Font->Show Fonts to bring up the Font pallette. This allows us to choose a new font for the selected text, change it's size and many other of it's properties.
To create the perception of lifting some text off the page, for instance, try clicking on the rectangle centered directly under the "Font" title of the Font pallette. To confirm that you've selected the correct rectangle, just hold the mouse pointer on the rectangle for a few moments until a tool tip pops up indicating that this is the Text Shadow rectangle. If it says something else, try again.
With the first paragraph selected when this rectangle is activated, the text in the paragraph will display shadows for each character. Directly to the right of the rectangle are three sliders, slide the first about 2/3 of the way towards the right, slide the second about 1/8 from the left and slide the third about 3/4 of the way toward the right.
As you do this, notice how the text seems to lift off the page. You can also click and drag the small indentation in the circle to the right of the third slider. As you do this, you'll see an apparent shift of the virtual light illuminating the text to cast the shadows at a changing angle.
Font Colors
You can also choose Format->Font->Show Colors to display the color pallette. However, like underlining, by default you will not be able to change text colors. Choose VoodooPad->Preferences… and select the Appearance tab to change this default behavior.
Text Alignment and the Ruler
In our overview, we touched on the text ruler. Triple click on the third paragraph to select the entire paragraph and bring the ruler up again by choosing Format->Text->Show Ruler.
The text ruler is primarily used for setting page margins, paragraph indentation, tabs and alignment or justification. It also has pop-down menus for selecting line spacing, bullet point styles and an alternate means of selecting font properties.
With the third paragraph still selected, click on the third tab in the ruler tab bar that looks like this:
This should justify (or straighten the edges of) the paragraph on both sides. Now select the document title, "You put your brain in it." and click the far left of the four tabs to left justify the title.
Setting Tabs
As a final demonstration of VoodooPad's standard text editing features, let's set some tab stops. First be sure that the VoodooPad window is wide enough by looking for the red Delete icon in the far right side of window's tool bar. If the far right icon is not the red Delete icon, then drag the lower right corner of the window to the right until red Delete icon appears.
Next scroll to the bottom of the page and click to place the text insertion bar at the very end of the text. Press the Return key a couple times to make some room. Then type in the following text. Note that as you do so, space each word or number from the others by a single tab:
Be sure that you've entered no spaces but only a single tab between each word or number. Then select all of the text in those five lines. With all five lines selected, go to the text ruler at the top of the window and drag all the tab stops that are to the left of the 5" mark out of the ruler. Don't worry if words or numbers in the five lines we've selected seem to go a bit berserk. We'll bring order to them shortly.
Look for the tab stop well at the far right of the ruler which looks like this:
Put your mouse pointer on each of the icons in the tab stop well for a couple seconds until a tool tips label appears. You should see that they are called from left to right respectively, the "Left tab stop", the "Center tab stop", the "Right tab stop" and the "Decimal tab stop".
Now drag a left tab stop from the tab stop well to the ruler and drop it at the top of the 3/4" mark. Next drag a Center tab stop from the well and drop it on the 2 1/4" mark. Next drag a Decimal tab stop from the well and drop it on the 3 1/4" mark. Finally, drag a Decimal tab stop from the well and drop it on the 4 1/4" mark.
If you've done this correctly, your five lines should now look like this:
Notice that the words in the Item column are left justified in the column. The numbers in the Quantity column are centered and the money amounts in the Price and Amount columns are aligned on their decimal points. Also notice a couple weaknesses in our formatting: the numbers in the number column should probably be centered in the column and the headers for the Price and Amount columns are right justified on the Decimal tab stops for each of those columns.
We could clean this up a bit by using different tab stops for the heading line then we used in the item and total lines, and by centering the numbers in the Number column, but we've demonstrated how the tab stops can be used and that was our objective in this tutorial.
If the resulting columnar list makes you uncomfortable, feel free to clean it up by inserting a tab at the left end of each of the last four lines, selecting only those four lines and adding a Center tab stop at the 1/4" mark. You can also select only the header line and replace the two Decimal tab stops there with two left tab stops placed at the 3" and the 4" marks. If you decide to do that, your result should look as follows:
But wait a minute, you say… the price for VoodooPad and FlySketch are $39.95, not $19.95! However, we reply, if you buy them in quantities of two or more, they're only $19.95 each.
Deletions:
Importing and Exporting
How does one publish or distribute a VoodooPad document?Beyond just emailing the VoodooPad document itself (which only works if the recipient also has the application), VoodooPad gives us other ways to export our work for distribution:
as a set of RTFD files (Rich Text Format with graphics)
as a set of plain text files
as Microsoft Word documents
as an XML file
to your iPod
to HTML pages that retain the same links
Let's try these one at a time.
Exporting as RTFD
First, create a folder on your desktop or in your home folder in which to do some playing. For purposes of our discussion, we'll call it VDTemp but you can call it any other name you can remember.If you've closed the LinksAndPages.vpdoc VoodooPad document, let's open it again. When it's open, choose File->Export->Export as RTFD files… Navigate the resulting File Save sheet to your new folder, VDTemp, then click the Export button.
Now open a Finder window into the VDTemp folder. You should see four documents in the folder:
HyperLinks.rtfd
Index.rtfd
manual creation of links.rtfd
VoodooPad.rtfd
If you double click on the Index.rtfd document, it should open in TextEdit as a Rich Text document containing the content of the page named VoodooPad from our LinksAndPages.vpdoc VoodooPad document.
Notice that all of the links that were present on that page in LinksAndPage.vpdoc are present here, but though they look like links, they're not. That's because TextEdit doesn't support links between TextEdit documents.
Instead of creating a single document with an arbitrary page order, VoodooPad creates a set of documents, one for each page, in a folder. You can reorder them and print them in any order you desire, rather than having an arbitrary order forced on you.
When you've examined those pages sufficiently, throw them in the trash (or drag them to some other folder) to clear the VDTemp folder for our next experiment.
Exporting as Plain Text
Next, let's try exporting as plain text. Once again, click on the LinksAndPages.vpdoc to make it active. This time choose File->Export->Export as Text files… Once again navigate the resulting Save File sheet to our VDTemp folder and click the Export button.Go back to the Finder window (or open a new one) in the VDTemp folder. Notice now that we have four files named the same as before, except this time they have the .txt suffix. Let's double click on Index.txt to open it again in TextEdit and examine its contents.
This time we see the same content that was in our Index page, but all in the same font with no font styles and no apparent links, not even simulated links. This should not be a surprise, since this was created as a plain text document. So if your only interest is in the content of your pages without regard to any formatting, this would be the appropriate export method.
Exporting as XML
Once again, clear the VDTemp folder for our next experiment. This time, choose File->Export->Export as XML…, navigate the Save File sheet to the VDTemp folder and click Save. When we go back to our Finder window in VDTemp, we have a small surprise. Instead of four files, one for each page in the original document, we only have a single file named after the VoodooPad document and suffixed with ".xml".Double clicking on this file could lead to various results depending on what applications you've installed that can open XML files. To make your results predictable so we can examine the file together, first open the TextEdit application (if it's not already open) and from its File menu, choose File->Open. Navigate the resulting File Open dialog box to our VDTemp folder and open the LinksAndPages.xml document.
It's beyond the scope of this tutorial to delve very deeply into what we're seeing here. It's legitimate XML, so if you're familiar with the XML format, the content of this open file might make some sense to you. For our purposes, it's sufficient to expose the file and add that this method of export works for at least two purposes:
to take a backup of our LinksAndPages.vpdoc document from which a new version, identical to the one we saved here, can be reconstituted.
to provide a human and machine readable back up file that can be meaningfully examined by humans and can be parsed by other applications for reasons we haven't even considered yet.
If you are a developer and have worked with XML formatted files, you'll recognize from this latter point that XML provides a medium for generated documents that may be directly imported into VoodooPad.
Exporting to Your iPod
If you don't have an iPod, you can skip this section, but if you have one, then plug it in.Once your iPod shows up in the Finder, choose File->Export->Export to iPod. Once this command has completed, eject your iPod and navigate using the scroll wheel to Extras->Notes. Next you will see the name of your document listed, and when clicked on using the scroll wheel, you'll see your index page show up on the pod, with links! To move around through your document on the iPod, use the scroll wheel to move up and down.
You will notice that sometimes a link has a dark underline, while all the other ones have a light grey underline. When a link is dark, you can use the iPod button in the middle of the scroll wheel to move to that page on your iPod, just like you would when clicking on a link in VoodooPad.
Exporting to the Web
For our final exporting exercise, choose File->Export->Web Export… which will display the Web Export Manager panel. On this panel, choose RTFD in the Export Format popup menu. Next, click the Choose… button to the far right of "Output directory:". When the Open dialog sheet appears, navigate it to our VDTemp folder and click Open. Leave the rest of the panel controls as they were and click the Export button. When you see the phrase, "Finished exporting" to the far left of the three buttons, Reset, Close and Export, then click the Close button.Go back to the Finder window (or open a new one) in the VDTemp folder. Notice that we have four files, as before, but this time with ".html" suffixes. If you double click on index.html, a page should open in your web browser with the content of our Index page showing links. If you click on any of the links, it should take you to the page comparable to that page in VoodooPad.
It's important to recognize that though we are seeing the same content and clicking links with the same functionality, we are doing all of this in a web browser and using .html files, not the VoodooPad document. If we made a change to our VoodooPad document at this point, we wouldn't see the corresponding change in the web browser unless we exported again into the same folder.
In fact, while keeping our web browser open, let's do that. Go back to our work area in VoodooPad and click on the Home button in the Toolbar. On the Index page, add the following indented line to the bottom of the page.
This is a line not yet reflected in our web pages.
and click the Save button in the Toolbar. The line is now saved in our VoodooPad document, but should not be seen in our web version. To confirm that, let's go back to the Finder window and double click on the index.html file to reopen it in our web browser. The page that opens should be our Index page, but there should be no indication of the last line we added. Once again, keeping the page open in our web browser, go back to the Work Area in VoodooPad and choose Web export…
The Web Export Manager panel should already be set up the way we want it, but to be sure, check that the Output directory is our VDTemp folder. Now click the Export button. When you see the phrase, "Finished exporting" to the far left of the three buttons, Reset, Close and Export, then click the Close button.
Now if we go back to our web browser page and click the Reload button which looks like this in Safari:
…then we should see the last line appear. In other words, we've just updated our little local web site with the new content from VoodooPad.
The other settings for web exporting in the Web Export Manager panel can be found in the VoodooPad manual under the Help menu.
Exporting to the Web makes our document easier to distribute widely than the printed page. It is easily reviewed by anyone who has a web browser, and today, that includes nearly everyone using computers. Finally, it retains its dynamic organization of pages, in which each page is related to the others through hyperlinks rather than through some sort of simulated physical proximity.
Importing
Now that we've seen how to get information out of a VoodooPad document in several different formats, the next natural concern is how to get information into the document. The most obvious answers, of course, are to do what we've been doing, that is, type or paste the information in. However, we have other options, including:
importing files
dragging text
dragging pages
Edited on 2008-01-30 16:44:46 by BradEllis
Additions:
Oldest known version of this page was edited on 2008-01-30 16:44:13 by BradEllis []
Page view:
Importing and Exporting
How does one publish or distribute a VoodooPad document?
Beyond just emailing the VoodooPad document itself (which only works if the recipient also has the application), VoodooPad gives us other ways to export our work for distribution:
as a set of RTFD files (Rich Text Format with graphics)
as a set of plain text files
as Microsoft Word documents
as an XML file
to your iPod
to HTML pages that retain the same links
Let's try these one at a time.
Exporting as RTFD
First, create a folder on your desktop or in your home folder in which to do some playing. For purposes of our discussion, we'll call it VDTemp but you can call it any other name you can remember.
If you've closed the LinksAndPages.vpdoc VoodooPad document, let's open it again. When it's open, choose File->Export->Export as RTFD files… Navigate the resulting File Save sheet to your new folder, VDTemp, then click the Export button.
Now open a Finder window into the VDTemp folder. You should see four documents in the folder:
HyperLinks.rtfd
Index.rtfd
manual creation of links.rtfd
VoodooPad.rtfd
If you double click on the Index.rtfd document, it should open in TextEdit as a Rich Text document containing the content of the page named VoodooPad from our LinksAndPages.vpdoc VoodooPad document.
Notice that all of the links that were present on that page in LinksAndPage.vpdoc are present here, but though they look like links, they're not. That's because TextEdit doesn't support links between TextEdit documents.
Instead of creating a single document with an arbitrary page order, VoodooPad creates a set of documents, one for each page, in a folder. You can reorder them and print them in any order you desire, rather than having an arbitrary order forced on you.
When you've examined those pages sufficiently, throw them in the trash (or drag them to some other folder) to clear the VDTemp folder for our next experiment.
Exporting as Plain Text
Next, let's try exporting as plain text. Once again, click on the LinksAndPages.vpdoc to make it active. This time choose File->Export->Export as Text files… Once again navigate the resulting Save File sheet to our VDTemp folder and click the Export button.
Go back to the Finder window (or open a new one) in the VDTemp folder. Notice now that we have four files named the same as before, except this time they have the .txt suffix. Let's double click on Index.txt to open it again in TextEdit and examine its contents.
This time we see the same content that was in our Index page, but all in the same font with no font styles and no apparent links, not even simulated links. This should not be a surprise, since this was created as a plain text document. So if your only interest is in the content of your pages without regard to any formatting, this would be the appropriate export method.
Exporting as XML
Once again, clear the VDTemp folder for our next experiment. This time, choose File->Export->Export as XML…, navigate the Save File sheet to the VDTemp folder and click Save. When we go back to our Finder window in VDTemp, we have a small surprise. Instead of four files, one for each page in the original document, we only have a single file named after the VoodooPad document and suffixed with ".xml".
Double clicking on this file could lead to various results depending on what applications you've installed that can open XML files. To make your results predictable so we can examine the file together, first open the TextEdit application (if it's not already open) and from its File menu, choose File->Open. Navigate the resulting File Open dialog box to our VDTemp folder and open the LinksAndPages.xml document.
It's beyond the scope of this tutorial to delve very deeply into what we're seeing here. It's legitimate XML, so if you're familiar with the XML format, the content of this open file might make some sense to you. For our purposes, it's sufficient to expose the file and add that this method of export works for at least two purposes:
to take a backup of our LinksAndPages.vpdoc document from which a new version, identical to the one we saved here, can be reconstituted.
to provide a human and machine readable back up file that can be meaningfully examined by humans and can be parsed by other applications for reasons we haven't even considered yet.
If you are a developer and have worked with XML formatted files, you'll recognize from this latter point that XML provides a medium for generated documents that may be directly imported into VoodooPad.
Exporting to Your iPod
If you don't have an iPod, you can skip this section, but if you have one, then plug it in.
Once your iPod shows up in the Finder, choose File->Export->Export to iPod. Once this command has completed, eject your iPod and navigate using the scroll wheel to Extras->Notes. Next you will see the name of your document listed, and when clicked on using the scroll wheel, you'll see your index page show up on the pod, with links! To move around through your document on the iPod, use the scroll wheel to move up and down.
You will notice that sometimes a link has a dark underline, while all the other ones have a light grey underline. When a link is dark, you can use the iPod button in the middle of the scroll wheel to move to that page on your iPod, just like you would when clicking on a link in VoodooPad.
Exporting to the Web
For our final exporting exercise, choose File->Export->Web Export… which will display the Web Export Manager panel. On this panel, choose RTFD in the Export Format popup menu. Next, click the Choose… button to the far right of "Output directory:". When the Open dialog sheet appears, navigate it to our VDTemp folder and click Open. Leave the rest of the panel controls as they were and click the Export button. When you see the phrase, "Finished exporting" to the far left of the three buttons, Reset, Close and Export, then click the Close button.
Go back to the Finder window (or open a new one) in the VDTemp folder. Notice that we have four files, as before, but this time with ".html" suffixes. If you double click on index.html, a page should open in your web browser with the content of our Index page showing links. If you click on any of the links, it should take you to the page comparable to that page in VoodooPad.
It's important to recognize that though we are seeing the same content and clicking links with the same functionality, we are doing all of this in a web browser and using .html files, not the VoodooPad document. If we made a change to our VoodooPad document at this point, we wouldn't see the corresponding change in the web browser unless we exported again into the same folder.
In fact, while keeping our web browser open, let's do that. Go back to our work area in VoodooPad and click on the Home button in the Toolbar. On the Index page, add the following indented line to the bottom of the page.
This is a line not yet reflected in our web pages.
and click the Save button in the Toolbar. The line is now saved in our VoodooPad document, but should not be seen in our web version. To confirm that, let's go back to the Finder window and double click on the index.html file to reopen it in our web browser. The page that opens should be our Index page, but there should be no indication of the last line we added. Once again, keeping the page open in our web browser, go back to the Work Area in VoodooPad and choose Web export…
The Web Export Manager panel should already be set up the way we want it, but to be sure, check that the Output directory is our VDTemp folder. Now click the Export button. When you see the phrase, "Finished exporting" to the far left of the three buttons, Reset, Close and Export, then click the Close button.
Now if we go back to our web browser page and click the Reload button which looks like this in Safari:
…then we should see the last line appear. In other words, we've just updated our little local web site with the new content from VoodooPad.
The other settings for web exporting in the Web Export Manager panel can be found in the VoodooPad manual under the Help menu.
Exporting to the Web makes our document easier to distribute widely than the printed page. It is easily reviewed by anyone who has a web browser, and today, that includes nearly everyone using computers. Finally, it retains its dynamic organization of pages, in which each page is related to the others through hyperlinks rather than through some sort of simulated physical proximity.
Importing
Now that we've seen how to get information out of a VoodooPad document in several different formats, the next natural concern is how to get information into the document. The most obvious answers, of course, are to do what we've been doing, that is, type or paste the information in. However, we have other options, including:
importing files
dragging text
dragging pages