This chapter tells you how to start up HoTMetaL PRO, and gives the basic information you need to start creating and editing files. It contains sections on the following topics:
If you are new to HoTMetaL PRO, you should certainly read this chapter, as it will help you get acquainted with the product and learn about the components and procedures you'll need to get your work done.
HoTMetaL PRO is an editor for creating files that can be read by browsers (such as Mosaic, Netscape, and Internet Explorer) that are connected to the World Wide Web (WWW). The file format for such files is called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). The main difference between an editor like HoTMetaL PRO and browsers such as Netscape is that HoTMetaL PRO is used to create and edit files, and browsers are used to retrieve, display, and read files. Any text editor can create an HTML file (but we believe that HoTMetaL PRO is a much more convenient and pleasant way of doing it). Browsers open files saved by HoTMetaL PRO that consist of text and markup, and do things like screen formatting, generating graphical forms, issuing mail messages, and so forth. It's important to understand that the different kinds of programs do different things. There are many browsers available, and they can process the same HTML file in different ways-and these are outside the control of HoTMetaL PRO. What is in HoTMetaL PRO's control is creating correctly marked-up documents. You will find this important because documents are more easily interchanged (displayed by different people using different browsers, for example) when they conform to an agreed standard.
In order to use a Web browser and put your HTML documents and images on the Web, you must have access to an account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The original ISPs were government and university sites; nowadays, most ISPs are commercial sites, where users pay for access or companies put their information on the Web. Most ISPs provide you with browser software to access the World Wide Web, and space on their server to put your HTML documents. Some ISPs are local-specific to a particular city or area-while others are very large and can be accessed from many different areas. The geographical location of your ISP does not matter; once your documents are on a server that is connected to the World Wide Web, they can be accessed from anywhere.
Note: The HTML format is an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).
Some browsers have a command (usually called View Source... or a similar name) that lets you see what the HTML format looks like. HoTMetaL PRO provides an easy-to-use, graphical, structured editor for creating files in this format.
Run a command of the following form to extract the files:
tar xvf CD-mount-directory/hmpro3.solaris-sparc.tar
(`CD-mount-directory' is the path to your CD device.)
For example:
tar xvf /cdrom/hmpro3.solaris-sparc.tar
This command will extract the files into the current directory. The tar filename will be platform specific, as in the example above.
cd hmpro3
./install
If you didn't carry out this step when you installed HoTMetaL PRO, you should do so now.
The directory where HoTMetaL PRO is installed is referred to as `the HoTMetaL PRO directory'.
Unless you always run HoTMetaL PRO using an `absolute' path, you must inform HoTMetaL PRO of the location of the HoTMetaL PRO directory explicitly, or it will not be able to find the various auxiliary files and directories that it needs to run. There are two ways to do this:
In the ksh or sh shell:
SQDIR=/usr/local/hmpro3; export SQDIR
In the csh shell:
setenv SQDIR /usr/local/hmpro3
The SQDIR variable may also be set in the .profile, .cshrc, or .login file, as appropriate.
hmpro3 -sqdir /usr/local/hmpro3
If you set the HoTMetaL PRO directory using both methods, the value that you specify on the command line will take precedence. If you will be running more than one copy of HoTMetaL PRO, and will have a different HoTMetaL PRO directory for each, you should specify the directories on the command line.
PATH=$SQDIR/bin:$PATH export PATH
set PATH=($SQDIR/bin $PATH)
Now that you have installed HoTMetaL PROand configured the environment, you can run the program:
hmpro3 &
If you are using HoTMetaL PRO on a network, you will have to make some decisions about where certain files (i.e., macros, customized spelling dictionaries, and customized style files) will be stored and accessed. Since these files can all be customized for individual users, you will have to set the path options in HoTMetaL PRO to point to locations in one of your personal directories, (e.g., /usr/home/userboy) where you have read/write privileges on all the files, and where there is no danger of someone copying their styles or macros over your own. If you set these options to point to one of your personal directories, you should copy the related directories (i.e., macros, spell, styles) from the HoTMetaL PRO directory to your home directory.
You can set most of these file locations in the Options dialog box under the Special menu (see click here), or in the .hmpro3rc file (see click here).
Note: In some cases, your system administrator may have set the appropriate paths for you. If you are in doubt, contact the person who installed HoTMetaL PRO on your network.
Much of HoTMetaL PRO's behavior is controlled by the hmpro3rc file in the HoTMetaL PRO directory and the .hmpro3rc in your home directory. The .hmpro3rc file takes precedence and is updated automatically when you make choices from the Options... dialog, choose a browser with the Preview command, etc. If you ``know what you're doing'', you can edit the .hmpro3rc file directly (using a text editor). Both the .hmpro3rc and hmpro3rc files have comments explaining what each section does.
The hmpro3rc file in the HoTMetaL PRO directory is likely a `read-only' file configured by your system adiminstrator.
After you change the .hmpro3rc file you must restart HoTMetaL PRO in order for the changes to take effect.
You can configure many aspects of HoTMetaL PRO's behavior using the Options... command in the Special menu. This command lets you configure:
The Options dialog box is divided into sections, each of which becomes visible when
you click on the corresponding radio button.
The options are documented in the sections on the features they affect. If you want to find information on a specific option, look under `options' in the index.
When you create your web sites in HoTMetaL PRO, you will generally be saving your documents to a machine that is not directly connected to the World Wide Web. In order for your documents to be accessible over the Web, you must:
While HoTMetaL PRO is not a telecommunications program and therefore cannot upload your files, HoTMetaL PRO does provide a quick and easy way of changing your URLs so that they will work on the Web. The command is called Publish...: see the tutorial and reference sections on this command for more information.
This section gives the basic information needed to start editing files with HoTMetaL PRO.
hmpro3 &
When you launch HoTMetaL PRO, it automatically opens the default template file. You can choose a different default template in the
Defaults for New/Open section of the Options dialog box.
To create a new file based on a template file of your choice:
The template dialog box appears. See the following section.
A number of document templates are supplied with HoTMetaL PRO, in the templates directory within the HoTMetaL PRO installation directory. These include templates for personal home pages, corporate home pages, and internal (intranet) pages. You can open these by choosing the New... command in the File menu or typing Ctrl+N at the keyboard. This brings up a dialog box that allows you to choose which template you want to open.
When you open templates with the New... command, HoTMetaL PRO opens a copy of the document, not the document itself. Therefore, when you save that document, you will not be saving over the existing template.
You can use any document that you have created as a template. You can save it to one of the currently existing folders inside the
template directory (Company, Personal, Intranet,
or Tutorial) or you can create your own directory. If you create a new
directory within the
template directory, it will show up as a template group in the New dialog box.
You must put some descriptive text inside the template's TITLE element in order for it to show up in the New dialog box.
Unless you want to modify the template file itself, you should not open template files by choosing the Open... command in the File menu: if you do so, any edits that you make will directly modify the template file. Changes that you save to the file will permanently alter the template and will be present whenever you open that template using the New... command.
If you already have an HTML file that you want to edit:
toolbar button.Once you've done this, HoTMetaL PRO opens the file and you can begin editing.
HoTMetaL PRO will try to open HTML files even if they contain bad markup, but occasionally it will not be able to open a file. A dialog box may come up with an error message.
In addition to opening HTML documents, HoTMetaL PRO can open files in a number of common word-processing formats. These files are converted to HTML. See the section Opening a file for more information.
Now that you have an open file, you can start entering text and markup. The markup consists of:
If you're unsure of what to do at this point, we suggest that you try the HoTMetaL PRO tutorial which has exercises demonstrating the main features of HoTMetaL PRO and HTML.
There are many ways to insert and edit markup and text in HoTMetaL PRO. Commands can be accessed in four ways:
This section provides a summary of the main features.
The Undo command in the Edit menu allows the effect of the last operation to be undone.
Typing text, and any command that changes the content of the document, can be undone.Note the following actions that cannot be undone:
If you execute several Undo commands in a row you will undo the most recent action, and then undo the second most recent action, and so forth. By default, you can undo the
last 30 actions.
You can change the default undo limit in the
Defaults for New/Open section of the Options dialog
box.
To reverse an Undo, you must use Redo. If you have performed several Undos, you can reverse each of them by performing an equal number of Redos. If you perform one or more Undos, and then perform an undoable action, you will no longer be able to redo any of the Undos.
If you undo a Copy or Cut command, the previous contents of the clipboard will be restored.
Since HoTMetaL PRO is a structured editor, you can easily select and move around parts of the document structure without having to worry about making the markup invalid.
It is easy to select a whole element (and its sub-elements, if any). There are three ways to do this:
To select several consecutive elements, put the insertion point just to the left of the start-tag of the first element that you want to select, and drag down and/or to the right, as appropriate. (Similarly, you can put the insertion point just to the right of the end-tag of the last element, and drag up and/or to the left.)
If you start dragging inside an element, HoTMetaL PRO will not let you drag past the start- or end-tag of that element. For example, if you have an OL list, and you put the insertion point to the left of one of the <LI> start-tags and drag down, you cannot drag past the </OL> end-tag.
The Cut, Copy, Paste, and Delete commands work as they normally do in word-processing applications. The only exception to this is that in HoTMetaL PRO, a selection can contain elements. For this reason there will be circumstances where removing or pasting a selection would cause the document to be incorrectly marked up.
If you try to do a paste that would cause the markup to become invalid, you will get a warning dialog box that gives you the opportunity to turn rules checking off if you want to continue with the paste. There are some circumstances in which you will never be able to do a paste, such as when the insertion point is inside an IMG element, which cannot contain text or markup.
Cut and Delete will be disabled if you select one of the elements HTML, HEAD, or BODY.
If you choose Select Element, the current element, including its start- and end-tags, will become highlighted.
To perform the equivalent of `Select All' on a document, place your cursor inside the HTML element (but not inside any other element) and choose Select Element from the Edit menu.
If you want to see what your document will look like in a Web browser, click on one of the preview toolbar buttons in the third toolbar. These four buttons are in a group at the right end of the toolbar.
The toolbar button will be blank if you have never chosen a browser for that button. If you click on a blank button, you'll get
a file chooser dialog box that lets you locate and choose a Web browser. When you have selected a browser in the file chooser dialog box, the blank toolbar button gets filled with a small icon: 
. When you hold the mouse cursor over the button, a `tooltip' will appear in the message box at the bottom of the document window telling you what browser will be launched with that button. All future previewing can be done with one click on that toolbar button.
Note: If the selected browser is currently running, the preview button will load your document into a new browser window. To avoid running multiple instances of your browser, you should close the browser application after you have previewed the document. If you will be repeatedly editing and previewing the same document, you may want to leave the browser window open, save your document in HoTMetaL PRO, and use your browser's `reload' function to call up the latest saved version of your document.
To change the browser associated with a toolbar button, you must choose Preview... from the File
menu and delete the browser from the browser list. The toolbar button will become blank; a new browser can be selected either from
the Preview dialog box, or by clicking on the blank toolbar button.
You can also preview documents without using the toolbar.
The browser is launched, displaying your document. If your document hasn't been saved, you will be given the choice of saving it and previewing, saving it as a temporary file and previewing, or cancelling the operation.
If you want to add a browser to the list:
Selection text entry box. You can also type command line options after the command.To delete a browser from the list:
Previewing a document with this command is the same as saving the file with HoTMetaL PRO, launching the browser independently of HoTMetaL PRO, and then opening the file with the browser.
The name of the current element (the one containing the insertion point or selection) is displayed in the `mini-context area', which is at the bottom left of the document window, below the horizontal scrollbar.
You can change the width of the mini-context area in the
Defaults for New/Open section of the Options dialog: enter the desired width in pixels. Certain settings for the current element-such as
URLs and Name attributes-appear to the right of the mini-context area at the bottom of the document window.
If you have more than one document open in HoTMetaL PRO, you can move between the open documents by choosing the Documents... command in the File menu. This calls up a dialog box that contains a list of the open files. To make a particular file the current file, click once on the filename. Leaving this dialog box open on the screen also provides quick access to the New and Open... commands. To choose one of these commands, click on the appropriate button. Additionally, the names of the last four files that you opened with HoTMetaL PRO are added to the File menu. You can open a file (or make it the current file, if it's already open) by choosing it from this menu.
HoTMetaL PRO allows you to move between documents by following local links. If you have an anchor that points to a file on your system, right-clicking on this anchor will display a pop-up menu that contains the choices Edit and View. Choosing Edit will open the document in HoTMetaL PRO for editing (if it's not already open). Choosing View will preview this document using the default Web browser. (However, you cannot use HoTMetaL PRO to retrieve files over the Web.) These commands are also available from the Tools menu.
If a document has an anchor that points to a specific location in the same document, you can jump to that location as follows:
Alternatively, you can click once on the anchor and then choose View... from the Tools menu.
HoTMetaL PRO then scrolls to the location that the anchor points to.
HoTMetaL PRO has four toolbars, which are located just below the menu bar. The top toolbar (referred to as the `Standard' toolbar) provides quick access to a number of frequently-used menu commands. The middle (`Common HTML') toolbar is for creating the more common HTML elements; the bottom (`Other HTML') toolbar is for creating the less common HTML elements. If you position the mouse pointer above the button, a `tooltip', a short description of what it does, will appear in the message area at the bottom of the document window.
The Toolbars... command in the View menu lets you choose which toolbars should be visible.
New... Open... 
Save 
Print...
Cut 
Copy 
Paste 
Undo 
Redo 
Find and Replace... 
Find Next 
Check Spelling... 
Thesaurus...
Hide Tags 
Insert Element... 
Remove Tags 
Validate Document When you click on a button in one of the HTML toolbars, HoTMetaL PRO will insert an element or change the current element type, as appropriate. See the section Using the toolbars to create markup for more information.
Part of HoTMetaL PRO's interface is a context-sensitive menu that appears when you right-click in the HoTMetaL PRO document window. This menu changes depending on where you click. There are three different menus that can appear: the Default pop-up menu, the Anchor pop-up menu, and the Image pop-up menu.
The Default pop-up menu gives you easy access to some commonly used HoTMetaL PRO commands:
The Anchor pop-up menu appears when you right-click inside an anchor element. It has all of the default commands, plus two that are specific to anchors:
The Image pop-up menu appears when you right-click inside an image element. Clicking inside an INPUT element of type `image' also brings up this pop-up menu. In this menu, several commands are disabled, because you can't cut, copy or insert an element within an image. The View... command displays the image in the default image viewer and the Edit... command brings up the image in the default image editor. There are two more commands in this menu that are specific to images:
Image Attributes dialog box HTML supports the ISO 8859/1 character set (also called ISO Latin-1) and a number of other `special' characters. To enter a `special' character (one that doesn't have a key on your keyboard) you can:
toolbar button. This gives you a
dialog box for special characters:
Click on a character with the mouse to insert it.
Note: When you save a file, non-ASCII characters will be converted to entities. For example, `é' will be converted to the entity definition that Web browsers can read: `é'.
By default, the HTML tags in your document will appear on the screen as small tag icons. The tags that point to the right are start-tags, indicating the beginning of an
element, while those that point to the left are
end-tags, indicating the end of an element. If you choose Hide Tags in the View menu, the tags will be hidden. The command will then toggle to
Show Tags: choosing this command will display the tags again. The
toolbar
button is equivalent to this command.
You can configure HoTMetaL PRO to show or hide tags by default in the
Defaults for New/Open section of the Options dialog
box.
You can set the colors of the tag icon (foreground and background) and the size and font of the tag text in the General section of the
Options dialog box.
Comments are a special type of HTML markup, and do not appear when a document is viewed in a Web browser. They are often used to make remarks on the document that can be useful for Web
developers and content creators. You can show or hide comments within HoTMetaL PRO. If you choose Hide Comments in the View menu, comments will be hidden. The command
will then toggle to
Show Comments; choosing this command will display the comments again.
You can configure HoTMetaL PRO to show or hide comments by default
in the
Defaults for New/Open section of the Options dialog
box.
Comment tags are displayed and hidden by the Show/Hide Tags command in the same way that element tags are.
If there are sequences of commands that you frequently type in while editing in HoTMetaL PRO, you may find it convenient to create a keyboard shortcut-called a keyboard macro or simply a macro-to make your work easier. There are some useful macros that come with HoTMetaL PRO, and you can make your own personal ones.
If you see a Web page that contains a typographical effect, form, etc., that you like, then the easiest way of achieving the same thing yourself may be to save the file with the browser (make sure you save it in HTML format) and then open it with HoTMetaL PRO. Remember, though, that some files that you download from the Web may have incorrect markup, and that graphic images are not saved with the file when you download a Web page: they are separate files. Also note that while document markup is not copyrighted, content and graphic images can be.
Choose Technical Reference from the Help menu to link to many URLs for documents that contain information on HTML usage.
Our own tutorial on using HoTMetaL PRO and HTML is in the next chapter, and there are several more tutorials and `How-To' documents that come with HoTMetaL PRO. You can access the `How-To' index from the from the Help menu. A number of HTML tutorials, of varying quality, are also available on the Web.
The relevant Usenet newsgroups (those in the comp.infosystems.www hierarchy) are a source of information, including an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list.
SoftQuad's online Support Center is available for registered HoTMetaL PRO users from the SoftQuad home page (http://www.softquad.com/). It contain answers to frequently asked questions, particularly those that concern auxiliary technologies such as browsers.
As well, any bookstore with a computer section is likely to have many books on the World Wide Web, HTML, Web browsers, and the Internet in general.