Anybody familiar with a word processor should quickly find him- or herself right at home with Alventis Memos. Which is why we won't go into excruciating detail on how to select text with a mouse or make the cursor jump to the beginning of the next word. Instead, we will start by listing things that may differ from the most well-known word processors or may not be obvious for other reasons.

 

RichViewEditMemo

 

•No right margin. That's right, there sort of isn't one. Resizing the Memo extends it to the right (or shrinks it) – indefinitely. This obviously affects the way the text flows. The reason why this is the way things work has to do with printing. We won't go into detail here, but imagine a simple example. You have a table with 15 string fields (think ordinary Text Boxes) and a Memo. How shall we print out such records? We could of course put the string fields at the top followed by the Memo spanning the entire width of the page. Fine. But what if we wanted to lay things out differently. What if we wanted to place the 15 string fields on the left and the Memo on the right? Not a bad idea. Except that it means that it is the layout of the specific Report that will determine the width our Memo will be printed with. And we can have more than one Report with wildly different layouts. This is why we cannot reliably predict what the "correct" width of our Memo should be. What if our table has two Memos? We may want to print them side-by-side – at least in some Reports. Well, you get the picture. Alventis focuses on the actual data rather than page layout, and as a consequence things that have to do with margins are very different from word processors you may be familiar with.

 

As a matter of fact, the are no margins in Memos at all. At least not until the Report stage. It is only then that you can lay things out on a page and decide how narrow or wide you want them. If you do want to know in advance how things will look when the Memo takes, say, the width of a whole page, is quite easy: just resize either the entire InfoView form or just the Memo portion of it (if it allows you to do so) in such a way that the Memo width becomes what you expect it to be one the final output page. That's one of the reasons the Ruler is at the top of every Memo. If it isn't, just click the little button at the top/right corner of the Memo to toggle it On.

 

•No Real Left Margin Either. You can "pretend" there is one using the Ruler above the memo. Dragging the left margin at the point where the mouse cursor becomes a left-right arrow does indeed work. In the sense that you do end up with blank space on the left side of the Memo that looks like a margin. And that's precisely it: it only looks like one. This is not a real margin that will be saved with the Memo or get printed. It's nothing but blank space. It does have a use though. When the mouse is in that blank space, clicking it selects a line of text and dragging it selects multiple lines – just as in most word processors. This is why you may want to still have a small "margin" there.

 

•InstaButtons. They are: Font, QuickStyle, all Color buttons, Paragraph Format, Bullets and Numbering, Symbol Picker, all Memo Table related ones, Picture Format, and Border Style. The most important and unique characteristic of InstaButtons is that you can have as many of each kind as you like. With ordinary toolbar buttons and menu commands, even if you create multiple instances of the same button, they all behave as one. For example, place two Italic buttons on the toolbar. Whenever one is depressed, so is the other. No matter how many you place on the toolbars, all of them are "linked" and represent the exact same thing, which is why nobody uses more than one in the first place. Most buttons in Alventis are such ordinary buttons that do not offer any benefit from appearing more than once. Except InstaButtons.

 

Each InstaButton has its "personal" attribute or set of attributes that is independent from all others, even other InstaButtons of the very same kind.

 

Take for example the Font InstaButton, and imagine we have two such Font InstaButtons side-by-side on the toolbar.

 

The first one may "contain" a full set of font attributes of, say, the Arial font, blue-on-yellow. The second one may represent Times New Roman Italic / red-on-turquoise.


InstaButtonsFont1D

 

You will see in just a moment how you control which InstaButton has what set of attribute values, but the uniqueness of InstaButtons lies in the fact that the above two instances of the Font InstaButton behave as if they were completely separate bar items. The chapter on Toolbar Customization describes how you can customize the bars and menus and create as many copies or clones of an InstaButton as you like (right-click the toolbar if you are overly impatient).

 

Clicking an InstaButton immediately applies to the text whatever set of attributes it represents. Applying either of the two fonts for which there exist "dedicated" InstaButtons is therefore just one click away.

 

InstaButtonsFont1B

 

Clicking on the little drop-down arrow next to an InstaButton opens a dialog box that allows you to edit that button's attributes. Most dropdown dialogs work in some ways like menus: they don't have an OK button, and they get closed automatically if you click anywhere outside them. More importantly though, most of them work in a "live" mode: any changes you perform in the dialog are immediately reflected in whatever selection you may have had in the Memo. For example: select some text and drop-down the Font dialog. It does not display the current font of the selected text, but rather the font of the InstaButton you dropped down. Change any attribute, e.g., turn Italics On: the selected text becomes italicized (while you're still in the Font dialog). Make the Bold button depressed: the selection becomes bold (in addition to whatever other attributes are selected in the Font dialog). And so on. Once satisfied, all you have to do is click wherever you want outside the dialog, perhaps somewhere in the text of the Memo: the Font dropdown closes, and the last set of attributes you "arrived to" has been assigned to the InstaButton – so that next time you need it, you could re-use the same set with a single click on that InstaButton. You can quickly assign a particular set of attributes to InstaButtons (e.g., Font, Bullets and Numbering) by placing the cursor somewhere in the formatting you like (or selecting it) and Shift-clicking the InstaButton.

 

The QuickStyle InstaButton is special in quite a few respects. Basically, it allows you to apply or clear the set of text attributes of your choosing. It is described in detail in the QuickStyle chapter.