Editing with the Internal Editor

Starting in version 3.10 of DONATION, there is a new internal editor used for viewing and editing mail merge letters. It is used both for editing the letter files (the templates for mail merge) and for viewing, optionally editing and printing completed mail merges.

The editor should be very easy to use. It is pretty much WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), with standard menu and toolbar options for editing. When you are editing the original letter files with the codes for the various merge-able fields in them, there is a drop-down list of those fields, and an Insert button that inserts them into the document at the current cursor position. When you are editing the merged letters, those controls for inserting fields are not there.

This editor is actually editing HTML files, like those that are used for web pages. Internally, what DONATION is doing is embedding an Internet Explorer window into its own window, and putting it into "edit mode", which allows editing of the page. (This is not a feature that can be accessed when you use Internet Explorer normally, but it can be controlled by programs.)

Like the main window, the editor window can be resized by clicking and dragging any edge or corner, and moved by clicking on its title bar and dragging it. When you re-open it the next time, it will be the same size and at the same position as when you last used it.

Menu Option	Hot Key	Toolbar Icon	Action
Open...	Ctrl-O		Allows you to open a different HTML file for editing.
Save			Saves any changes in the current file back to your hard drive. This is disabled when no changes have been made. N.B. Pressing Ctrl-S in the editor will also save, but it is not recommended, because strangely enough the editor won't know you have saved, and it will still prompt you to save when you exit!
Page Setup...			Brings up a Page Setup dialog box, for settings such as margins. Note that Internet Explorer's default page header and footer are turned off whenever you are using this editor, and that change applies even to printing from a regular Internet Explorer window while this editor window is open.
Print Preview...			Brings up a Print Preview of the document. N.B. for very long merged documents (e.g. hundreds of pages), this can be rather slow.
Print...			Brings up a normal Print dialog box from which you can print the document.
Save PDF...			Brings up a Save PDF File As dialog, in which you can specify the filename and directory to save a PDF copy of the current document in. After the save, it displays the PDF file in your standard viewer for PDF files (usually Adobe Reader). See also: Saving Reports, Receipts and Letters as PDF Files.
Exit	Alt-F4		Exits this editor window. If there are unsaved changes, it prompts for whether you want to save them.

Menu Option	Hot Key	Toolbar Icon	Action
Undo	Ctrl-Z		Undoes the last editing action. This is disabled when there is nothing to undo. Note that after Saving a file, you are no longer able to undo any changes prior to the save.
Cut	Ctrl-X		Cuts any selected text out of the document, and puts it into the clipboard.
Copy	Ctrl-C		Copies any selected text to the clipboard.
Paste	Ctrl-V		Pastes any text (possibly including formatting) from the clipboard into the document. Note that you can copy text from other programs, e.g. word processors like Microsoft Word or WordPerfect, to the clipboard, then Paste them into this editor.
Bold	Ctrl-B		Changes any selected text to boldface, or to normal if it is currently bold. If there is no selection, toggles whether or not the text you will type after the current cursor position is bold.
Italic	Ctrl-I		As for Bold
Underline	Ctrl-U		As for Bold
Find	Ctrl-F		Brings up a Find dialog box
Justify			Brings up a submenu of the following options:
Left			Left justifies the current paragraph, or selected paragraphs
Center			Centers paragraphs, as above
Right			Right justifies, as above
Full			Does full justification, as above
Ordered List			Changes the current paragraph or selected paragraphs to be part of an ordered (i.e. numbered) list.
Unordered List			Changes the current paragraph, or selected paragraphs to be part of an unordered (i.e. bulleted) list.
Indent			Increases the indent level of the current paragraph, or selected paragraphs (i.e. moves them to the right). N.B. This indents the whole paragraph, not just the first line.
Outdent			Decreases the indent level of the current paragraph, or selected paragraphs (i.e. moves them to the left).
Indent First Line of Paragraph			Indents the first line of the paragraph in which the cursor is located, by 1/2 inch. Note: For some reason this action cannot be Undone, except of course by exiting the editor without saving your changes.

Image...			Brings up a dialog box where you can specify an image to be inserted into the document at the current cursor position, and some properties for it.
Table...			Brings up a dialog box where you can specify a table to be inserted into the document at the current cursor position, and some properties for it.
Horizontal Line			Inserts a horizontal line at the current cursor position.
Page Break			Inserts a page break at the current cursor position. Among other users, this would allow you to create multiple-page letters (e.g. for a receipt with a cover letter).

Menu Option	Hot Key	Toolbar Icon	Action
Refresh	Ctrl-R		Reloads the current document from the disk. Useful if it has been edited by another program (see the following two options).
View/Edit Source			Optionally saves the current document, then opens the HTML source code for it in Notepad. (Only for use by people who know HTML.) If you make changes in Notepad and save them, use Refresh to bring them back into this editor.
Edit in Microsoft Word			Optionally saves the current document, then opens the document for editing in Microsoft Word. If you make changes in Word and save them, use Refresh to bring them back into this editor. (See below for important notes.)

There are no options on this menu - just click the Help menu heading itself to bring up this help page.

If you right-click in the body of the editor, a standard popup menu appears. Note that this menu is provided by Internet Explorer, not by the DONATION program, so it has a few quirks in relation to how similar features work on the main menu and toolbar of this editor.

Cut, Copy and Paste, and Insert Image all work just like the same-named features in the window's menu and toolbar.

View Source works a bit differently - it doesn't prompt to save any changes first, so if there are changes, it has you edit a modified document filename. So, any changes you make will not affect the original document.

Browse View takes you out of edit mode on the document, so that you cannot make any further changes to it or save it. (So, I don't recommend using this!)

If you right-click on certain types of content, such as an image, different options may appear. I've noticed that not all of them work, such as when there is a "Properties" option, it does nothing. Sorry about that!

If you hover your mouse over a toolbar icon, it will show a description of what that tool does. If you want to see text with each icon, right-click anywhere in the toolbar and pick Show Text from the popup menu.

Other than the Hot Keys listed in the table of menu options above, here are few other keystrokes you may want to be aware of (most of which are in common with other word processors):

Other standard word processor actions also tend to work, such as selecting text by either clicking and dragging the mouse through it, or holding down the Shift key and using cursor movement keys (such as arrow keys).

If you use the Actions à Edit in Microsoft Word option, the current document is first saved if it has changes (and if you agree), then opened for editing in Microsoft Word. I strongly recommend that if you save any changes to your letter files in Word, you use Word's File à Save As menu option, and change the Save as type to "Web Page, Filtered". The other options for web pages either create files that can't be opened at all in this editor, or ones that are extremely complex and comparatively huge.

Also, you must Close the file in Word before returning to edit it further in this editor. If you don't, and you try to save it again in this editor, the file will not be able to be saved and you will get error messages.

So, why would you want to edit the document in Word? Well, it's just a more full-featured editor. For editing plain text, this internal editor is perfectly fine. But when you go beyond that, you may need more power.

The biggest issue, in my experience, is for documents like the sample receipt layouts that are installed with the program, that use invisible tables for layout. In this internal editor, the table boundaries truly are invisible, so it's a bit hard to figure out what is going on. In Word, the table cell boundaries are shown in a light grey colour, and you can use lots of menu options to make changes to the structure of the table. (You can't change the structure of an existing table at all in this editor.)

You can also edit the properties of things like images and horizontal lines in Word, which you can't do in this editor. (If you want to change the properties of an image in this editor, you have to delete it, then re-insert it and choose the properties you want in the insertion dialog box that comes up.)

Please note that there are features in Microsoft Word that do not translate perfectly when saved as HTML. In some cases, you may have to touch up files edited with Word in this editor a bit after saving them. But usually this works great.

Although there is no menu option in this editor for doing this, if you do not use Microsoft Word but use another word processing program (such as WordPerfect), you could also try editing the letters with that word processor. Almost any relatively recently word processor should have the ability to both load and save HTML files.

Of course, I cannot guarantee exactly how compatible the HTML editing and saving capabilities in other word processors will be with the internal editor in DONATION. You will have to test that out and see how it works for you. It will always be best to just use the internal editor as much as possible.

Once you have entered a table, image or horizontal line in the editor, you can't change them very much directly. If you click in them, they become selected with drag handles, which you can click and drag on to change their size. (A table becomes selected if you click on its border, rather than into a cell.) They may also be able to be affected with menu options / toolbar controls such as Indent/Outdent and the Justify options. However, you can't do anything like changing the name of a file used by an image, or the number of rows or columns in a table. For that, you would have to either delete the object (by pressing the Del or Backspace key on your keyboard when they are selected) and recreate it, or use Actions à Edit in Microsoft Word, or Actions à View/Edit Source if you know HTML and want to edit the HTML directly.

Of course, you can edit the text in table cells, by clicking into the cell and editing normally. Many of the regular menu/toolbar options work within cells as well, such as justification, fonts, etc.