User Interface

The menus and dialogs provided in Layout Editor are slightly different from those in Layout Developer. While the structure remains the same, some menu items have been removed as they are considered ‘developer tools’ or they are not relevant to Layout Editor workflows. Additionally, some dialogs have been changed to reflect the inability to access template code.

• Only editable tag types can be viewed. This means that the ‘browse tags’ dialog will only show those accessible to Layout Editor users to open. The other tags are still in the document, but the user cannot see them. When selecting a control stream (for example, a context control stream or an accolade) then the control stream must exist in the document.

• The ‘New’ option is no longer available for restricted tag types including the majority of the control stream types. If, for example, a user wishes to apply an accolade, they can only apply pre-existing accolade control streams. They cannot create new ones.

• The Paragraph properties dialog no longer creates a new style, but will output the equivalent processing instructions at the cursor’s position. Creating and updating styles is a developer task, and this dialog in Layout Developer does just that.

As we know, Layout Developer is hugely flexible and it is possible to do almost anything from processing instructions in the text. For this reason, the only processing instructions which will be executed from within text (.tx) and XML (.xm and .xd) tags are those with a x3b2: prefix. Formatting processing instructions inserted from the Text or Paragraph Properties dialogs will be of the form <?x3b2:layout ?>. The menus and dialogs have been updated for Layout Editor to output processing instructions with this prefix, and both Layout Editor and Layout Developer will handle them. File type will determine which processing instruction type is output within Layout Developer. If a user adds standard processing instructions in Layout Developer and then saves as a Layout Editor file, these instructions will be skipped during formatting. There is a document preference in Layout Developer to use the prefixed PIs instead. This also means that <?show > processing instructions cannot be used inline.

As with menus, toolbars within Layout Editor are slightly different, the ‘run’ and ‘debugger’ icons having been removed. Layout Editor’s default main toolbar will feature two new groups of icons:

• Text Inserts — A customisable set of tools to insert markup into the content stream in order to apply formatting changes (bold, italic, underline etc) and to insert common items such as graphics and tables. As mentioned, these can be easily customised to suit the template’s intended use. These tools are active in Text mode. See the Insert Markup documentation provided with Layout Developer for more information.

Common to Layout Developer, a ‘Stream Properties’ toolbar has been added to the bottom toolbar. This allows the whitespace behaviour of the current stream to be controlled. Included are tools to:

It is expected (and encouraged) that template developers will create customised interfaces for their Layout Editor users. The way to do this in Layout Editor is through libraries. Files such as siconsuser.3ad are removed from the installation, so using the appropriate tools in libraries is the best way to make these changes. See the Appendix for a list of allowed custom files. As mentioned above, the text inserts behaviour can be customised. Refer to the documentation provided for the Insert Markup feature for this. Menu strings can still be created and changed using the defstr and application.setString() methods. Outside of libraries, however, all strings below 4000 are protected..