<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation:  The graphical user interface > Main Window > Tools menu > Help Editor/Viewer

 

The Help editor displays the Help text of components. It is a rich text editor with support of RTF-text format with variations in fonts and colors, but this is not much utilized in standard components.

 

When used as a viewer of component help (Help button in Component dialogs), no editing is allowed and the File menu provides printing options only. Consequently, the Find & Replace option of the Edit menu is not available. The Word Wrap option of the Character menu can be used to toggle the insertion of extra line breaks at the right margin, so that the text fits in the window.

 

To edit component help there are three options.

•Local Help for individual components can be edited via the Edit definition button which shows the Edit Definition dialog box. Further click  and the Help Editor button. In this latter case a Done option appears in the main menu and the File menu provides printing options and a Cancel choice only. By selecting Done you accept any changes made to the help text and return to the Edit Definitions dialog. From ATPDraw version 5.7 the help file can be RichText 1.0 with customizable font format from the Context menu (right click). Text can also be pasted in from WordPad, but bitmaps are not supported.

•Global Help for standard components can be edited via Library|ATPDraw.scl followed by selection of the component name and using the Edit Definition dialog box with the same options as above.

•Global help for user-specified components can be edited via Library|"Templates on disc"|"Edit model sup" or Library|"Templates on disc"|"Edit user specified". Again with the same options as above. Alternatively Tools|"Help editor" can be used directly. When the editor is invoked from the tools menu, the File menu will contain an Open and a Save option. The text buffer is initially empty, so you have to select File/Open in to order to load the help text of a support file.

 

The default help editor/view font can be changed by selecting the Font option in the Character menu. A detailed description of available options can be found in the menu options help topic.

 

The Help editor has a context menu (right click) to apply RichText font settings ('Select font' can change all properties of selected text).

 

The status bar at the bottom of the window displays the current line and character position of the text buffer caret, and the buffer modified status. This status bar is not visible when viewing component help.

 

When the user clicks on a component's Help button global + local help is displayed. In addition a global text stored in the /help folder is added if present (for example resistor.txt).