Getting Productive with XMLMind
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
You can also traverse up and down the node hierarchy using the movement buttons (bullet 2) or their corresponding keyboard shortcuts (Control-Up or -Down to move to parents and children, and Control- Shift-Up or -Down to move to adjacent siblings; as usual, if you're on a Mac, use the Option key rather than Control, since XMLmind does a really good job of showing that a comfortable Mac application can be written in cross-platform Java). Try playing with these and looking at the visual feedback.
To get an alternate view of what is going on, switch away from the nice WYSIWYG DocBook view to the actual document structure by choosing 0 (no style sheet)in the View menu:
This gives you a tree view of the document, which is often useful when you are focusing on structural organization more than the raw content:
Figure 2. The document in Tree View
Try exploring the other view choices, which are also useful in other contexts. (We just learned that you can have multiple views open at once by choosing the Add... option in the View menu! When we are on a large screen, we'll probably keep both the DocBook and structural views open side-by-side most of the time now.)
And later we learned that, despite the intense flexibility of view configuration offered by the above dialog, there is an even easier way to get side-by-side styled and tree views as a default. This is found in the Window pane of the Preferences (or Options, depending on your platform menus) dialog:
Recall why we started this discussion about structure and selection: It very much affects the behavior of the application. Bullet 3 in Figure 1 points out a set of very useful buttons that lets you insert a new XML element into, before, or after your selection, change the current node to a different kind that fits there, or wrap it with another node. It's definitely worth experimenting with these capabilities a bit and getting good at them. When you click on one of them, the interface below will show you the legal choices for elements for the operation you're trying to perform (and you can type leading characters to jump to the one you want if there are many legal choices). If you don't see the choice you expect (or the buttons are completely disabled), you are probably at the wrong depth in the XML hierarchy, so either Control-Up or -Down to get to the right place, or click on the right node in the path. Here we're about to insert a figure after a list item:
