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Text Area
Text in the Text Editor is displayed and printed using the non-proportional font face Courier, which is suitable for displaying ASCII texts such as source code.
While the screen font is fixed, you can change the font face used use for printing by editing the SDT preference SDT*PrintFontFamily.
Text Editing Functions
The following text editing functions are provided in the text window:
Text Selection
To select text you can either:
- Drag the pointer over the text.
- Place the cursor in the beginning or end of the text to be selected and then <Shift>-click where you want the selection to end.
Word Selection
Double-click a single word, delimited by spaces, to select it.
Line Selection
Triple-click a line of text to select it.
Text Editing
- Position the cursor by clicking or by using the arrow keys.
- Insert characters after the current position of the text pointer.
- Delete one character backward by pressing <backspace>.
- Delete one character forward by pressing <delete>.
- Replace selected text by typing.
- Delete selected text by pressing <backspace> or <delete>.
Undoing Text Modifications
The Undo command reverts the previous editing command. Several undo operations can be performed in sequence to undo sequences of editing commands.
Undo can negate the effects of all commands that alter the text in the Text Editor; however, the effect of user operations on endpoints and links cannot be undone by the undo command.
Depending on the nature of the last performed operation, the effects of the last text editing operation is undone, on a per editing operation. For undo purposes, the text editor recognizes the following operations:
- Typing a character
- Inserting a character or a fragment of text
- Deleting a character or a fragment of text
While having to undo each typed character individually may be somewhat inconvenient, a keyboard accelerator (<Ctrl+Z>, see Keyboard Accelerators) can speed up the process.
Note that since the text editor supports unlimited undo, it is not possible to use the undo operation to undo the last undo operation. Instead there is a keyboard accelerator (<Ctrl+Y>, see Keyboard Accelerators) which can be used repeatedly to undo the effects of a sequence of undo operations.
Editing Text Containing Endpoints
It is possible to edit text using normal operations even after endpoints have been embedded in your text. To unambiguously determine the effects of editing operations on endpoints, the Text Editor uses the character just before the position of your insertion cursor or your selection (the initial character) to determine if your editing affects an endpoint:
- If the initial character belongs to an endpoint (e.g. the insertion cursor is positioned just after an endpoint), inserted text will become part of the endpoint.
- If the initial character belongs to non-endpoint text (e.g. the insertion cursor is positioned just before an endpoint), the inserted text will not be included in an endpoint.
When deleting or overwriting text, you should be careful not to delete or overwrite all characters in an endpoint since this will remove the endpoint and the associated links.
Dealing with Consecutive Endpoints
When working with consecutive endpoints (i.e. two endpoints follow each other without any intervening non-endpoint text), it is impossible to insert extra characters between these endpoints using the normal text editing operations, since any text inserted between the two endpoints will be considered a part of the first endpoint.
If this particular case arises, you should use Clear Endpoint (see Link > Clear Endpoint) to remove some characters from one of the endpoints so that some non-endpoint characters become available between your endpoints.
Also note that while the text editor has no difficulty in dealing with consecutive endpoints, visual limitations will make it difficult to distinguish between the two endpoints. You should therefore avoid using consecutive endpoints if possible.
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