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The Internet Magazine Generator - Article Desk Module

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The Basics of Writing an Article

As the most fundamental rule you should always remember: Use the Context Menu. Whenever you are looking for a suitable function for what you are just doing, try to position the mouse cursor over the object in suspect and click right mouse button.

Basically, creating an article is very simple: You enter the body text in the text area, perform some editing tasks such as marking text strings as underscored, bold etc., insert tables, add images and links. You may enter native HTML-code, though this should not be neccessary in many cases. E.g. if you want to have a sentence displayed in bold, you just type the text into the text-area, then mark (select) the text with the mouse and finally click on the <B> in the formatting bar. The same applies to underscoring, italics and entering a table structure.

Finally you press on the 'Create'-button. If you have the 'Upload'-checkbox checked, then the article ist uploaded to the server immediately, where you may inspect it and see what it looks like.

In the second step you may perform any modification to the article, then press on the 'Update'-button.

Writing the Body Text of an Article

Writing the Body Text of an Article is again very simple. You start by invoking the context menu over the body text area, select 'New Article'.

In addition to the pure body text you must enter a headline for the article, optionally an overhead text and an underhead text. The font styles for all these types of text are defined internally by default, but you may specify your own font properties by using the Format-tool

Adding Images to the Article

Adding a single image as part of the article (no link)

From the File Selection Box you drag-and-drop any image-file (e.g. jpg) into your body text, right at where you want to have the image displayed. That means, you must position your mouse cursor at the desired position before you perform the drag-and-drop-operation.

Adding a single image as thumbnail, with link to a window showing the full image

From the File Selection Box you drag-and-drop any image-file (e.g. jpg) onto the "Drag-drop-here"-button. As a result a dialog window appears, where you may specify some properties such as the alignment of the thumbnail (left / right), the size of the thumbnail, the underline text and some more.

Again, you must position your mouse cursor at the desired position before you perform the drag-and-drop-operation.

Adding an image-galery as thumbnail, with link to a window showing the full galery

Following these instructions will result in an icon placed in your article having two links:

• One link to a galery-processing in a 'traditional' (pure html-based) manner
• One link to a galery-processing with Flash-technology,

This is performed in three steps:

Put in short:

1. Create A Galery: Invoke context-menu over the "Drag-drop-here"-button
2. Specify Galery-properties by invoking the context menu over the _Gal-directory in the File-Selection-Box: 'Set Galery-Props'
3. Drag the Galery into our article

1. As a first step, you must Create A Galery. This is done by invoking the context menu over the "Drag-drop-here"-button: Select 'Create an image-galery'. Resulting is a subdirectory under you current rubric-directory named '_Galx', where x stands for a serial number 1,2, ... which is maintained automatically by the program.
   Alternatively, you may create a subdirectory named '_Galx' under the approriate rubric-subdirectory manually, i.e. by any system utility or by commandline 'mkdir'.

2. Now you must specify some properties of the galery, which results in the uploading of some files onto the server (the 'galleryfile.xml' and the 'Galery.id'). This is done by invoking the context menu over the _Gal-directory in the File-Selection-Box: 'Set Galery-Props'.

   A dialog-window appears where you specify a galery-title and short description and where you should check the 'upload'-checkboxes.

3. Finally, from the File Selection Box you drag-and-drop the galery-directory-icon onto the "Drag-drop-here"-Button. As a result the same dialog window as described above appears, where you may specify some properties for the galery-thumbnail, which ist built from the first image in the galery-directory.

... which finally is presented in the web-browser as a framed thumbnail-image which has two lonks: the left one to the 'traditional' galery, the right one to a galery in Flash-technic:

Adding an 'image-bar' (horizontal or vertical) as a series of thumbnails

An image-bar is a rectangular area of thumbnails which may be clicked upon to show the full image.

At first you must start PMView and open the directory of the images that you want to have in the image-bar.

Then, back to phpGUI, position the mouse cursor at the point in the article where to put the image-bar. Then invoke the context-menu, select 'Create Image-Bar'.

A dialog appears, showing some entry-fields and a large multiline-edit field. Into this multiline-edit field you must drag-and-drop the images - one by one - from the Open-dialog of PMView. You may drag as many images as you like, but due to the limited space in the article a number of 4 - 6 is recommended.

After having dropped all images you must specify: Orientation (horizontal or vertical) and the total-size of the image-bar (width resp. height).

Finally click 'Generate'. This function guarantees, that each of the thumbnail images ('tiles' in the image-bar) have the same height (in the case of horizontal orientation) or same width (in the case of vertical orientation), while all thumbnail images fit into the given total-size of the image-bar.
You're done.

Editing an Image-Bar

• Orientation [H|V] or Side [L|R]: Edit 'inline' the Special-Tag-line
• Width/height: Doubleclick on the Special-Tag-line brings up the Image-Bar-Dialog, where you can alter every parameter.

Adding Links to the Article

Creating a link to some foreign URL

Creating a link to any object in a separate window

The object you want to use as a link-target is in most cases a html-file in your directory. Mark any text portion and drag the file from the File-Selection-Box (at the right side of the text-area) onto the Auxwin-icon.

Special Formatting Options

Adding a Table

Let's presume you have a bunch of 'dataxy'-data and want to present it as a HTML-table:

data11;data12;data13;data14

data21;data22;data23;data24

data31;data32;data33;data34

data41;data42;data43;data44

Now mark the lines (select them with your mouse) and click on the table-icon. Immediately a HTML-table-structure is created. You may edit this HTML-code any way you want, e.g. you may want to have a border around the table:

Edit the line:

<table border=0 cellpadding=2 cellspacing=4 width='100%'>

into:

<table border=1 cellpadding=2 cellspacing=4 width='100%'>

resulting in this table:

Creating a Contents-List (List of Topics)

Proceed as follows:

1. Type in the headings of each topic, line by line
2. Mark the whole sequence of topic-lines as 'selected'
3. Then:
   

   Click on the Topics-icon

1. The 'floating' side of the topics-area (left or right)
2. The width of the topics-area

1. A meta-text around your topics-lines
2. The neccessary section-headers for each of the topics