'Getting You Started' guide to
Pagemaker 6.5

Section 6 Story Editor

Story Editor

The Story Editor is PageMaker's own built-in Word Processor.  It enables you to have access to WP-like facilities without leaving the PageMaker environment.  In 'Story View', you lose the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) character of the screen, but gain by having certain new 'additions' available to you.

Entering/exiting Story Editor

Using the 'Text' tool, click anywhere inside the text block to be edited. Then select 'Edit', followed by 'Edit Story'.

To exit, select 'Edit' and 'Edit layout'

Spell Checking

To check the spelling of the story, select 'Utilities' and 'Spelling'. A dialogue box appears, as below:

Click on 'Start' to begin spell checking. When a suspect word is found, you can -

i) ignore it, if it is a proper noun, for example.

ii) replace it, either with one of the options given or a word of your own choice

iii) add it to the user dictionary (this option may not be available if you are using a networked copy of PageMaker, or if the directory is protected).

Finding/changing

Finding and changing text works very much as for standard word processors. Select 'Utilities' and either 'Find' or 'Change'. The dialogue box which appears allows you to enter the word to find, and the replacement word if appropriate.

An extra facility is the ability to incorporate the attributes in the search and/or replace words. To do this, select 'Character Attributes' or 'Paragraph Attributes' in the 'Find' or 'Change' box. A new box appears, allowing you to choose the attributes you require for finding or changing. (The 'Character Attributes' box is shown).

Note that if you select an attribute other than 'Any' in the 'Find' attributes, only words with this attribute will be found. By combining this with the words entered in the main dialogue box, you can, for example, change all occurrences of a particular word to 'Bold'. But beware that because the Story Editor does not display all the visual attributes of the text (e.g. font style and font size), some changes will not be apparent until you switch back to layout view.

Preferences

The appearance of the text in the Story Editor can be changed without affecting the appearance of the actual document. Select 'File', followed by 'Preferences', 'General', 'More'. In the box which appears is a section allowing you to modify the Story Editor layout.

Note that if the font or size of text is changed here, it only affects the Story View. The two check boxes on the right allow you to see the style names in the margin (this is on by default), and any 'hard' carriage returns, tabs and spaces in the text (off by default).

Exercise

Open the file created earlier containing the text from guide.txt. Using the 'Text' tool, click somewhere in the story, and then switch to Story Editor. Use the Story Editor facilities to do the following:

• Check the spelling. Add unknown words to the dictionary if you feel they may be useful.
• Make every occurrence of the word 'TVU' appear in bold type.
• Investigate other uses of 'Find' and 'Change'.
• Modify the Story Editor preferences to change the appearance of the screen to your liking.