_______________________________ Jreepad (C) 2004-2006 Dan Stowell http://jreepad.sourceforge.net/ Jreepad is open-source software. See "Help > License" in the menu for more detail. This manual written in Jreepad 1.0 by Dan Stowell - with inspiration taken liberally from the "Treepad Lite" manual! _______________________________ This manual was written using Jreepad and consists of numerous articles linked in a tree structure. The tree, in the left pane of the program, consists of 'tree nodes'. Each 'node' has an 'article' of text associated with it - click on the node's title to view the associated article in this pane. If a node has 'children' then you'll see a symbol (such as a plus-sign or minus sign, or a little triangle) to indicate that its subtree can be opened or closed. Double-click on a node's title to expand/collapse the subtree (or click on the plus/minus/triangle/whatever symbol!). Open up this node to see a set of nodes containing information about using the main features of Jreepad.... (How to "open" the node? The easiest way is to double-click on the title, over on the left side of the screen - "Using Jreepad".)The main Jreepad window consists of the Tree part on the left, and the Article part on the right. The Tree and the Article part can both be resized by dragging the vertical separation line between the two parts. The tree part consists of 'nodes', which can be considered leafs of the tree. Nodes can be connected to each other in a hierarchical fashion. Every node can itself be associated with an article. An article contains the information you want to store in the form of a piece of text. Jreepad is a simple to use utility. Tree nodes can be moved, deleted, inserted and edited in the standard tree-based way which will be familiar to anyone who has used some of the common graphical file-management utilities. The articles can be edited like in a normal text-editor. Although the program is easy-to-use and conforms to the standard behaviour of Java GUI interfaces, actions like moving nodes and editing are explained in full detail below. The tree is the left part of the screen. If it's empty you can load a file into it, or you can add a node into the empty tree (see "Adding/deleting nodes" below). You can select one of the "nodes" in the tree just by clicking on it. You can also use your cursor-keys to navigate your way around the tree - try it now!If you're using the mouse, you can double-click on any node to open/close its subtree. (Of course, if the node doesn't have a subtree nothing will happen!) Similarly, you can use the little icon to the left of the node's title, which you can use to open/close a subtree with a single click. If you're using the keyboard, you can use the left/right cursor keys to respectively close/open the selected node. N.B.: This only works if the "tree" view is the one you're using at the time. If you're editing in the article view, the cursor keys will move you around in the article. When you have a node selected (such as this one titled "Adding/deleting nodes"), you have a choice of three places you can add a new node: - Above the selected node - Below the selected node - As a child of the selected node The first three buttons on the toolbar give you these three possibilities. (They're in the Edit menu too....) (The fourth button is obviously used to delete the selected node.) The easiest way to rearrange the nodes on a tree is to click-and-drag to move them around. In this way you can move a node to a different place in the tree (so it has a different "parent"). You also have four buttons for moving nodes around, on the toolbar: - Up - Down - In - Out (They're also in the Edit menu!) "Up" and "Down" can move a node up and down relative to its siblings. "Out" will promote the node so that it becomes a sibling of the node that was previously its parent. "In" will demote the node so that it becomes a child of the sibling just above it (if there is one). If you look at the "Action" menu you'll see there are two options for sorting nodes: - Sort children (one level) - Sort children (all levels) Whichever of these you choose, the child nodes of the currently-selected node will be rearranged into alphabetical order. (If you chose the second of those two options, then the children of the child nodes will be sorted too. And the children of the children of the child nodes. And the children of the children of the children of the child nodes. And....) Editing a node's title should work just like editing (for example) a filename. On my Mac OSX, I can select the node, wait a second, and click on it again, or I can select it and then press F2. Both methods put the node in a mode where I can edit the title. When you've edited the title, simply press Enter to commit the change. (On my computer, if I decide I don't want to make the change after all, I press Escape and the node title jumps back to what it was before!) The article is on the right of the screen. You can type whatever you like in it...! You can use the usual cut-and-paste options that you use in other applications: select some text and press - [Apple+C] to copy the text - [Apple+V] to paste the text - [Apple+X] to cut the text (N.B. These are of course the shortcuts for Mac users! Instead of the Apple key, use whatever you normally use on your own system....) Jreepad also has built-in web-search: so you can select some text in the article and then choose "Google search" from the "Actions" menu to launch a search in your web browser. (By the way: You can import text files into Jreepad - when you do this, the content of a file becomes the "article". Very handy! Go to the "Actions" menu and choose "Search" to open up the search window. The search window has TWO boxes for you to type search text in: one box to search the node titles, and one box to search the article text. Type something into either one of the boxes - or into both if you have a very specific requirement! Remember to choose the correct option in the "Search where" dropdown: you can search in the selected node and its children, or in the entire file. Press "Search" and you'll see the table at the bottom of the window fill up with results. Double-click on any row in the results table, and you'll be taken to the appropriate node, in the main window. If you have some text highlighted in the article window, you can choose "Actions > Google search for highlighted text". This will launch a Google search in a web-browser window! You can customise the search to your own taste.... If you choose "Preferences" from the "Options" menu, you'll see there's a section about the web search. By default, the search is labelled "Google search for highlighted text" and searches www.google.co.uk. To search for (for example) the words "make a cake" on Google, we call the following URL: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=make%20a%20cake&hl=en The words we search for are "wrapped" in the rest of the URL. Similarly, for a Yahoo web search we can use the URL: http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search/ukie?p=make%20a%20cake&y=i So to make Jreepad search on Yahoo instead of Google, we can take the beginning of the URL (most of it!) and the end, and enter those into the appropriate boxes in the Preferences window. Customise it to use your favourite search engine! The basic idea: You can follow any link by choosing "Follow highlighted link" from the "Actions" menu. Open up this node and read the articles contained within, for more about how to use this functionality!Most of the standard forms of links should work as you expect. Try these examples - either select them, or just position the cursor somewhere inside them, then choose "Actions > Follow highlighted link" from the menu. Web link: http://jreepad.sourceforge.net/ FTP link: ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/ Email link: mailto:bgates@microsoft.com File link: file:///Users/harold/ file:///Users/harold/Documents/stripes.jpg ("File" links might behave differently according to which operating system you're using. On Mac OSX, the first example will open "harold"'s home folder, if he exists, and the second will directly open a JPEG file in his Documents directory.) Treepad Lite uses a URI-like format for links to a specific node within the current file. Try this one, for example - select the whole link and choose the menu option "Actions > Follow highlighted link". "node://Jreepad manual/Using Jreepad/File import and export" If you've used a wiki before you'll know what this is about - but if not, fear not! The idea behind a Wiki is simply to make it easy to create an interconnected web of articles, just as easily as typing text. Jreepad adapts some of the ideas from wiki. The key ingredient in a wiki is that if you type a WikiWord, which is any word which begins with a capital letter and has other capital letter(s) somewhere in the middle, the wiki converts this into a link to an article of that name. If the article exists, you can jump straight to it. If the article doesn't exist, it gets created and you can start to type text into it. You can also force a chunk of text to behave like a WikiWord by wrapping it in [[double square brackets]]. Try selecting these wiki-links and choosing "Actions > Follow highlighted link": DanStowell [[HTML]] WikiWikiWeb If you choose "follow link" but you haven't actually selected something which is obviously a link (it doesn't begin with something like "http://", it isn't a WikiWord, etc etc), Jreepad will either: - Assume it's a node title and search for a node of that title or - Do a web-search for the text You can specify which of these you want to happen in the Options > Preferences panel. Look in the "File" menu and see what options are available under the two submenus, "Import..." and "Export selected...". There are plenty of options! The HTML export is particularly useful for exporting a chunk of your Jreepad file, either for emailing to a colleague who doesn't use Jreepad or Treepad, or for printing out.You can import one Treepad file into another - it'll become a subtree branching off the node currently selected. Similarly, you can export the selected subtree as a standalone Treepad file; for example, if you need to send a branch of Treepad information to a colleague. Jreepad can export the currently-selected article as a simple plain-text file. When *importing* plain-text, Jreepad can import multiple text files at the same time. Choose a selection of text files, and they'll be each imported as a new child node (the node titles will match the filenames). Often in a text file, you have a list - one line per entry. Jreepad lets you import a text list directly, so that if you have your shopping list as a text file, containing the text: Bread Milk Eggs then Jreepad will create three new nodes, entitled "Bread", "Milk", and "Eggs". Jreepad's HTML export creates a nice, human-readable output. The output includes a simple embedded CSS stylesheet which formats the HTML page quite neatly. HTML export is very useful, for creating printouts or for sending an output of a Jreepad subtree to a colleague who may not use Jreepad or Treepad.When you choose to export HTML, you are presented with some options. The most important one is: do you want your articles to be interpreted as 1) Plain text? (Linebreaks are preserved) 2) Preformatted text? (Output is in a monospace font, and your linebreaks and other whitespace is preserved.) 3) HTML markup? 4) HTML created using "Textile" formatting? You can also choose whether you want URLs within your articles to be automatically turned into links. This is only applicable for the first two options above. The XML export creates an XML file with a very simple structure. It contains all of the information from the selected Jreepad subtree (node structure, titles, and articles). It should be straightforward to use this data in an XML editor or in other applications. For maximum compatibility with Treepad Lite, we set the default text encoding to ISO-8859-1 (this is a standard text encoding used by Windows). ISO-8859-15 is apparently slightly better so that's another option, but not default. If you want to preserve accented characters and other special characters, you might prefer to use Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-16). UTF-16 is a good one to use on Mac OSX, especially if you don't need to exchange Treepad files with Windows-Treepad users. Choose your preferred character encoding using the Preferences window! Open up this node to see what the "View" menu lets you do...The first three options on the "View" menu are about whether you want to see the tree, the article, or both at the same time. I normally always view both at the same time, but sometimes I switch into viewing just the article, if there's a large body of text that I need to type/edit in a single node. N.B. Look on the menu to see the keyboard shortcuts for these three options - very handy shortcuts You can turn the toolbar on and off using the "View > Toolbar" option. I normally leave the toolbar on all the time, as it doesn't do much harm! Treepad uses links which begin with "node://" to crosslink within a file. If you want to use this method too, you can simply choose the 'View > "node://" address' menu option to see what a link to the current node would look like. (By the way, I prefer to use Jreepad's WikiLikeBehaviour, since this provides slightly more stable and convenient crosslinking. To see how it works, highlight the phrase WikiLikeBehaviour and then choose "Actions > Follow highlighted link"! Within the View menu you will find a submenu marked "View this article as...". It allows you to display the currently-selected article in one of four formats."Text" is the default format, and it's the only format that allows you to edit the text. <h1>HTML-formatted nodes</h1> <p>If you know how to write HTML, you can write HTML in a Jreepad node and then opt to view it as rendered HTML. This displays the node a lot like a webpage.</p> <ul> <li><b>This</b> is a HTML-formatted node.</li> <li>Can you tell?</li> <ul> <blockquote><i>Hint: use the menu options to change this node back to plain text, and you can see the underlying syntax.</i></blockquote> A very,common,format is,"comma-separated",data. Jreepad can,convert it,to a table.,(Like this) h1. Textile h2. What is _textile_? __Textile__ formatting is very similar to wiki markup - a simple text format which looks quite elegant when viewed as plain text, but which converts in a straightforward manner into nicely-formatted HTML. * This node is a "Textile"-formatted node. * Can you tell? To see a simple example of the textile format, use the __View__ menu to convert this node to an ordinary text node. For a more complete example, see the child node attached to this node.This example is taken from JTextile's own test file: * one * two * three * four * five h2(fred). This is a title h3. This is a subhead This is some text of dubious character. Isn't the use of "quotes" just lazy writing -- and theft of 'intellectual property' besides? I think the time has come to see a block quote. bq. This is a block quote. I'll admit it's not the most exciting block quote ever devised. bq(http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/07/01/leave_rss_alone.html). This is a block quote. I'll admit it's not the most exciting block quote ever devised. Well, that went well. How about we insert an <a href="/" title="watch out">old-fashioned hypertext link</a>? Will the quote marks in the tags get messed up? No! "This is a link (optional title)":http://www.textism.com An image: !/common/textist.gif(this is the alt text - you probably can't see the image)! # Librarians rule # Yes they do # But you knew that Some more text of dubious character. Here is a noisome string of CAPITAL letters. Here is something we want to _emphasize_. That was a linebreak. And something to indicate *strength*. Of course I could use <em>my own HTML tags</em> if I <strong>felt</strong> like it. h3. Coding This <code>is some code, "isn't it"</code>. Watch those quote marks! Now for some preformatted text: *arse*<pre> <code> $text = str_replace("<p>%::%</p>","",$text); $text = str_replace("%::%</p>","",$text); $text = str_replace("%::%","",$text); </code> </pre> This isn't code. So you see, my friends: * The time is now * The time is not later * The time is not yesterday * We must act The concept for Jreepad is based on Treepad Lite. Treepad Lite is free software created by Henk Hagedoorn, primarily for Windows computers. The "Treepad" suite includes more feature-rich versions (these are not free!). Jreepad is only designed to be compatible with Treepad Lite files.... See http://www.treepad.com/ for more about the Treepad suite of software. Dan Stowell is the author of Jreepad. His website is http://www.mcld.co.uk/ (If you are wondering why this node exists, and why its title is "DanStowell" and not "Dan Stowell", then you haven't read the description of Jreepad's WikiLikeBehaviour Select the text on the line above, and choose "Follow highlighted link" from the Actions menu...!