Chapter 5. Using FOP editor applet

Table of Contents

FOP editor applet is like any other text processor and it has a some standard functions. Text can be easily formatted using menubar and/or toolbar. The WEB Administrator can adjust content of menubar or toolbar through the property file, so some of Editor's functionality or even whole menubar and/or toolbar could be hidden from the user (which will be described in the next chapter).

Menubar

Menubar consists of three menus: Edit, Format and Info.

Edit menu consists of three menu items: Cut, Copy and Paste. These commands are not standard. When you copy or cut some Editor-formatted text and then paste it to other location in Editor, you'll have the same formatted text at new location. Previous commands, in general, can't be used to copy some Editor-formatted text and then paste it into another application, nor to copy some text from other applications and then paste it to an Editor. To do so, user have to enable Java applet permission for using a system clipboard (as it is describe previous). After that user can paste text from other applications into FOP editor (whole inserted text will be formatted like the character before inserted text) and copy text from applet to other applications (which doesn't make sense, because text will not be copied as it is, but it will have the form of applet internal presentation).

Format menu is used to choose fonts (family, size and style). Three standard fonts are available: SansSerif (Helvetica), Monospaced (Courier) and Serif (Times Roman). There could be maximum 9 font sizes defined: 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 24, 36 and 48. Available styles are Bold, Italic and Underline. Different formatting can be applied to every part of the text.

Info menu consists of menu items Parametar Info and About. Parametar Info contains information of default values written in "main" property file and information of which property files are defined, by <PARAM> tags from HTML document, to be used by applet. About is standard about message box.

Toolbar

Toolbar contains shortcuts to the most using commands of FOP editor applet. It consists of buttons cut, copy and paste which have the same functionality as corresponding menu items. There are also corresponding toggled buttons for menu items Bold, Italic and Underline which is used for creating styles. Combo's on toolbar corresponds to menu items for choosing font family and size. There are also three buttons for aligning text (Left, Center and Right) which don't have corresponding menu items.