3582 There are several approaches one can take to creating Web pages. The classic old school method is to do it manually, typing HTML tags into plain next to create the formatting cues required by a browser. However, "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get) Web authoring applications that give non-technical computer users the power to create, edit and publish professional, attractive Web sites without requiring programming or HTML coding skills. have been around for a long time too. Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver are well-known examples, and many Mac veterans fondly remember, and some probably are even still using, Claris HomePage, a very decent example of the genre marketed by Apple in the 90s.

Instead of typing in HTML code and guessing what the published Web site may look like, WYSIWYG authoring programs allow users to constantly monitor how their site will appear even before it is posted online while working in a friendly, visual environment much like a word processor, These programs automatically create HTML code in the background - code that can also be easily previewed and directly edited.

Actually, quite a few word processors and even some text editors can save documents in HTML format, which is also a form of WYSIWYG, and then there are the template forms offered by most personal web page hosting services.

However, while I do a fair bit of HTML markup, and am not any sort of coding whiz, I have never been a big user of WYSIWYG Web authoring programs. Even at my rudimentary level of coding expertise, my personal preference is for manual coding, which gives one at least the notion of more precise control over the end result.

I did experiment with Claris HomePage a bit way back when, and also with the Composer HTML authoring module in Netscape Communicator, but always returned to doing it manually in BBEdit or with Tex Edit Plus enhanced with a bunch of some prerecorded and some custom-made AppleScripts for frequently used HTML markup functions.

There are several good Tex Edit Plus Applescripts that can turn word-processor type text - plain or formatted - into HTML documents at the click of a button. Works for me, but some folks like the nomuss/no fuss convenience of WYSIWYG composition and editing, so for them an application that conveniently automates the whole process is very attractive.

___

Nvu 1.0 WYSIWYG Web Authoring Software

The newest kid on the block in WYSIWYG HTML authoring programs is Nvu (pronounced "n-view" for a "new view") , a free, open source program spun out of the Mozilla (Netscape) Composer module, but with more features and a much slicker and more attractive user interface.

The Linspire Linux-based OS folks have picked up the ball that Mozilla/Netscape had more or less set aside, and broken out to run with it, a demonstration of one of the positive advantages of Open Source application development. Particular programs are not dependent on the continued interest and development effort of one proprietary source for their continued up-to-date availability.

Linspire provided more development resources and capital to the Composer-based product - renamed Nvu - to round out the Mozilla Internet suite. Along the way, Linspire partnered with several individuals and companies in the open source community, including Disruptive Innovations ( http://www.disruptive-innovations.com ) and Mozdev Group, Inc. ( http://www.mozdevgroup.com ). Daniel Glazman from Disruptive Innovations is the lead developer and maintainer for the Nvu project. Daniel has been the chief architect for Mozilla Composer and brings a tremendous amount of experience and expertise to the Nvu project.

What the project has produced is a much nicer, more powerful program that the old Composer module, and have made it available for OS X with an attractive Aqua interface,and for Windows, as well as the Linux version that was the primary objective of their project. The cross-platform Web editor works on numerous operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, OS/2, FreeBSD, Linspire, and many other Linux-based systems.

Nvu's five main advantages are cited to be:
1) Emphasis on ease-of-use for the non-technical user
2) Robust WYSIWYG editing
3) Integrated web file management
4) Enhanced handling of forms, templates
5) Extensibility which allows advanced users to build their own extensions to Nvu with a just a dash of JavaScript. For instance, it will be very easy to create new "smart widgets" (i.e. a calendar, a date/time widget, a mail widget, etc.) and integrate them with one click into Nvu.

Nvu is based on Gecko, the layout engine inside Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, and Netscape; it's a fast, very reliable, standards conformant engine maintained on a daily basis by a wide community of developers. Its support of XML, CSS and JavaScript offers an ideal authoring platform, and architecture based on XUL makes it a highly extensible editing tool. Nvu is a standalone tool that runs independently of any other Gecko-based tool and does not contain the other applications from the Mozilla Application Suite .

The recently-released Nvu 1.0 has several new features and improvements, including better performance and stability, a default in-line spell checker, a new user guide, and an expanded help section. In addition, Nvu 1.0 now complies with strict HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 standards, producing even cleaner code than before and ensuring that Web sites developed with Nvu function across a wide number of browsers.

Nvu also includes a cascading style sheet (CSS) editor, giving users a powerful tool for transforming and controlling the look and feel of their Web sites. CaScadeS, the well-known CSS editor add-on to Mozilla Composer, is integrated into Nvu. Create stylesheets easily and manage the styles attached to your documents. Full-powered by Gecko, of course, you can see your style settings applied '"live" to the document you're editing. Right-click on any element in the hierarchical toolbar at the bottom of the window and set directly its style properties.

With Nvu's FTP site manager, all the sites you have specified in your Publishing Settings become browseable in the Nvu window sidebar. You can get a tree view of a site, à la Explorer's folders pane, or a one-dir-only view, à la Explorer's directory view. It is also possible to filter files and show all files, or only HTML documents or image files. The browsing area also allows to show for each file its size and the date of last modification.

Nvu Tabs allow you to have one window only on your screen and edit several documents at once, each document having its own Undo/Redo stack.

I have been checking out NVU for the past several weeks, and it is indeed a very nice piece of work that creates quality HTML. It even makes the picky little adjudicator face in iCab stay smiling.

However, a major annoyance is that Nvu does not support opening documents by dragging them to its Dock ir application icon.

But not everyone has the same needs and requirements as I do, and if you want a pure WYSIWYG HTML authoring experience, NVU is a very nice, user-friendly package, and the fact that it's free doesn't hurt a bit.

For more information, visit:
http://www.nvu.com/

___

Using Tex Edit Plus X For HTML Authoring

It's no secret that I'm a BIG fan of Tex Edit Plus, Tom Bender's powerful and versatile little shareware text editor. TE+ is my favorite application, and I spend more time working in it than any other program. It is now so powerful that I very seldom have need of a full-fledged word processor, and TE + serves as my general-purpose word cruncher, HTML editor (customized with AppleScripts, about which more below), text cleaner, and archive application. I use Tex Edit Plus for drafting articles and correspondence, for cleaning up text from emails and downloaded from the Web, and for converting text documents to HTML for Web publishing.

One of the reasons Tex Edit Plus is so versatile is its comprehensive support of AppleScript, Apple's English-like programming language that allows you to use Apple Events to control applications. the slickest and best at this of any program I've used. The key element to this is the Tex Edit Plus AppleScript menu which displays menu selections for any AppleScripts that are located in the Scripts folder in the TE+ application folder. To add or remove a script from the menu, just drag it into or out of the Scripts folder. This facility allow you to quickly, conveniently, and flexibly customize script enabled functions to suit your particular needs, and dispense with scripted features that you don't use which cuts down on clutter. I wish every program I use supported AppleScript customization as elegantly as TE+ does.

There is also an optional floating Script Tools palette, which is actually a feature incorporated after I suggested to Tom Bender last year that it would be useful to have a button bar or floating palette that could toggle AppleScripts with a single click. The menu works well, but buttons would be even slicker. Actually, my “brainstorm� was not really original. I was inspired by the markup menu in BBEdit, since I use AppleScripts to add the BBEdit-esque features that I actually use to TE+.

Compiled scripts added to the new "Script Tools" folder will show up as buttons in the palette. Option click a button to edit its script. All very cool.

TypePad blogger Miraz Jordan says:

"I've written several times about Tex-Edit Plus, my favorite text editor. I download any beta or update as soon as it's available. I've been a bit busy lately so hadn't twigged to one of the new features in 4.8. Thanks to macscripter.net news though I've discovered a great new feature.

"I have a dozen or more Applescripts I rely on and use all day every day. Mostly I trigger them with key commands, but having them available as buttons will be really useful. I've dropped my most-used scripts into the Scripts Folder and the palette updated without even requiring me to close it.

"All I want now in TE+ is a preview window for web pages I'm developing. It's available in Smultron, Tag and SubEthaEdit (and probably others) so please, Tom, bring it to TE+."

Hmmm. That would be convenient.

Another way to quickly toggle scripts that you really use a lot is to assign keystroke shortcuts that activate them, which is done by simply adding the key(s)' name to the script's name with an underscore dash to the script's name for example: with the script Mac - HTML_F6, press the F6 key and a copy of your document gets converted to html while you watch.

A couple of dozen or so AppleScripts are bundled with the Tex Edit Plus standard download, and because Tex Edit Plus is recordable, you can record custom scripts of your own to automate tedious or frequently repeated tasks using the Apple Script Editor utility that is included with the Mac OS.

Aside from entire document html conversions, the scripts I use most often with Tex Edit Plus relate to things like converting text from/to lower/upper case, capitalization (yes, I know there are submenu commands in Tex Edit Plus that can do this too, but an AppleScript with a single keystroke shortcut is faster and slicker).

Bare Bones Software's BB Edit is an excellent tool for doing hands-on HTML markup, but for my purposes it has always seemed like overkill. My HTML authoring needs are not complex, but if yours are, check out BB Edit.

On the other hand, BB Edit lists for $179, while Tex Edit Plus sells for just $15. Basically, AppleScripts allow me to add just the HTML markup capability I need and want without a lot of other selections that I never use and which just get in the way.

Here is how I build an HTML page using Tex Edit Plus.

First I need the text. I usually rough out my articles longhand on paper and then dictate them into a Tex Edit Plus using iListen, or by way of ViaVoice. Pasted in URLs and e-mail addresses are added.

That next step is to convert the document to basic HTML. One tool that I use for this is the Mac -> HTML/F6 script which comes bundled with Tex Edit Plus. This script is based on: Script2HTML 1.0.2 by Bill Cheeseman, and the latest version of Bill's script is available at The AppleScript Sourcebook:
http://www.applescriptsourcebook.com/scripts.html

The conversion process takes a few seconds, and results in a copy of the original document in simple HTML form, leaving the original draft untouched. There are several other AppleScripts that will convert text to html that can be downloaded from Doug Adams' AppleScripts For Tex Edit Plus Archives Website.

After running the basic HTML conversion script, there is usually more markup work to do.

If I just want to create a line break where there isn't one, I use an "Insert Break" script.

Plain bullets aren't handled gracefully by Web browsers, so the next step is to convert bullets to proper HTML bullet tags with another script.

Most browsers can handle standard ("stupified" as opposed to "smart") quotation marks, but just to be sure, I run a script to convert quotes to html tags.

To turn URLs and e-mail addresses into clickable Web links, I have a couple of different scripts, or if I want to convert a piece of text to a clickable web link, I use the Selection -> Link script by Andrew Sasaki, which is downloadable from the Tex Edit Applescript Archive, where you can find nearly 200 free, downloadable AppleScripts. Most of the ones mentioned in this article, including my own little batch of recorded scripts called "HTML Suite" can be found on that site.

The Selection->Link script takes a text selection in Tex-Edit Plus and makes it into a web link. It's smart enough to handle URLs and plain text differently.

For many articles, that completes the HTML markup stage, but often there are other formatting jobs to add, such as

• Blockquoted blocks of text

• Bold for headings or emphasis

• Bold plus a point size boost for even more emphasis

• Centering blocks of text or tables

I also have a couple of scripts that create clickable text references and target couples within a Web page, such as jumping from a Table of Contents entry to the subhead for that topic in the column or article.

A useful AppleScript I downloaded from Doug Adams' Website colors all HTML tags in a document making it easier to proof read, or create HTML tables.

Jerome Koons' Create HTML Table makes an HTML table using user-supplied variables. It can be used in conjunction with the "Create Anchor Refs" script to place anchor references in the table.

When a markup is all done, the result is a document that when named with a html suffix can be opened with a Web browser as a formatted page -- essentially it is a Web page.

This system works well for me, and generates very clean text copy which is relatively easy to proofread and modify.

The AppleScripts described here do what I need to get done in HTML, but of course pretty much any HTML markup or text formatting function can be recorded and automated as Apple script.

You can download most of the scripts mentioned here (and many others) from Doug Adams's site here:
http://www.malcolmadams.com/te/

Tex Edit Plus system requirements:
Mac OS X 10.1 or higher

Tex-Edit Plus is $15.00 shareware

For more information, visit:
http://www.tex-edit.com/



Charles W. Moore

Tags: Hot Topics ï News ï Reviews ï Writing/Publishing ï MooresViews ï

Login † or † Register † †