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Usage of the manual

Although MetaEdit+ is easy to use, the large number of features may appear overwhelming to new users. This section provides some guidance on how to go about learning MetaEdit+, and how best to use this manual.

In this HTML manual, you can use the arrow buttons at the top and bottom of the page to move to the next section, previous section, or parent section. The up arrow with a line above it will take you to the very first page. The last button takes you to the frame version of the manual, which has the contents list in the left frame.

Guidance for learning

To become familiar with MetaEdit+:
1)Read Chapter 1 to get an overview of the environment.
2)Walk through the tutorial (Chapter 6). Especially for new users, the tutorial is the most efficient way to get to grips with MetaEdit+. It introduces and familiarises the user to MetaEdit+, its concepts, tools and capabilities. This part of the manual is best read while sitting at your computer so that you can experiment with the features of MetaEdit+ as they are described in the text.
3)Skim the components chapters (Chapters 2, 3 and 4), once you have completed the tutorial and gained some experience with MetaEdit+. These chapters contain in-depth information about each of the tools that you used in the tutorial: you do not need to know everything here, but it is useful to have a basic idea of what information is covered where.
4)Read Chapter 5, repository and graph structures to get an understanding about the Object Repository of MetaEdit+. This chapter describes how design information is structured and how you can link and reuse information you have already stored in the MetaEdit+ repository. You will meet the concepts described here throughout MetaEdit+, and an understanding of them will help you take full advantage of the power of MetaEdit+.
5)Use the menu reference (Chapter 7). In modern graphical user-interfaces, pop-up and pull-down menus play a central role for accessing functionality. MetaEdit+ is no exception. The menu reference chapter forms a quick source of information about MetaEdit+ functionality, thus serving both experienced users and novices. Similarly, you can refer back to the tools chapters (2, 3 and 4) to learn in more detail what each tool is capable of.

MetaEdit+ is a dynamic product under continual improvement, and there may occasionally be some differences between what is described in the printed manual and what is found in the current version. The HTML-based manual, however, is updated for any new changes or improvements as it comes together with the software installation package and patch files. Therefore, you are strongly advised to use the HTML-based version of the manual.

Conventions

Throughout the manual, you will find special notes and comments which point out important features and characteristics of the MetaEdit+ environment. These notes are printed in italics and are marked by an arrow () in the left margin. The steps required for performing MetaEdit+’s various functions are indented and numbered: 1), 2), 3) etc.

Menus and mouse buttons

Tools in MetaEdit+ have two kinds of menus: pull-down and pop-up. Pull-down menus are found in the menu bar under the window title bar, and pop-up menus are related to elements of the models. To use a pull down menu, select its label from the menu bar with the left mouse button and choose the desired function from the menu that appears. You may also open pull-down menus and choose items with their accessor key (underlined letter), and some menu items have direct keyboard shortcuts. (Throughout this manual we assume a right-handed mouse, i.e. one where the left mouse button is used for most operations.)

To use pop-up menus, first select the element to be operated on (e.g. with the left mouse button), and then use the right-mouse button to open the pop-up menu for further action. In all tools of MetaEdit+ the pop-up menu contains the specific functionality appropriate to the selected element.

List dialogs

MetaEdit+ makes extensive use of list dialogs for selecting among elements. To quickly select a known element in the list, simply type the first few letters of that element’s name when the dialog opens. This moves the cursor to the first element whose name begins with those letters. Pressing enter will choose the framed element, closing the dialog. Pressing space selects the framed element, and resets the typed buffer, so you can start typing a different name. You can also double click an element to choose it and close the dialog.

Some dialogs allow multiple selections: use shift-click or shift-space to select a contiguous section of the list, and control-click or control-space to select individual elements. Again, a double click first performs the selection operation (modified by shift or control keys), and then closes the dialog.

The Windows user interface standard prevents resizing of modal dialogs, which can make life difficult if not everything is visible in the default size. To help in such situations, MetaEdit+ includes a triangular resize corner at the bottom right of most dialogs. By clicking and dragging the resize corner, you can resize the dialog window to be larger.



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