The XMetaL editor environment

The XMetaL editor environment offers three additional views and two display modes, as well as the standard IXIASOFT CCMS functionality.

When you have the XMetaL editor installed with IXIASOFT CCMS Desktop, you have three additional proprietary views and two display modes. These views let you work with elements and attributes in a variety of intuitive formats. You also have an additional Table Toolbar to facilitate table editing.

Additional views

The XMetaL editor's environment offers you three proprietary views that let you insert elements, attributes, and special characters and symbols. The views include:

  • Element List - lets you insert and change elements.
  • Attribute Inspector - lets you review all attributes that apply to the element at the current cursor position. It also provides an intuitive interface for changing them.
  • Special Inserts - lets you insert symbols, special characters and XML entities directly into the editor, without having to type in escape characters or look up hexadecimal codes.

Editor display modes

The XMetaL editor lets you switch between two different XML document presentations:

  • Normal mode - displays the document in a WYSIWYG format, which makes it easy to work with text.
  • Tags on mode - displays the current document in a tag-oriented format that makes structural editing easy and straightforward. This is the mode that is shown in the image below.

Status bar

There's a status bar at the bottom of the XMetaL editor's display area. This status bar has two functions:
  • It has a set of buttons that let you switch between Normal and Tags on display modes.
  • It displays the element (and all its ancestors) for the current cursor position. If the beginning of the line is truncated, you can see more by maximizing the XMetaL editor.