Getting Productive with XMLMind
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

There are similarly a variety of paste options whose validity depend on what you are pasting and what element you have selected. Bullet 4 in Figure 1 is next to the Paste Before, Paste, and Paste After buttons; these are very useful and highly context-sensitive. The fundamental thing to keep in mind, though, is that if you've copied something and don't seem to be able to paste it, try navigating up and down the tree until you have an element of the corresponding type selected, and then you should be able to paste. (Using the keyboard is often faster than the mouse, so don't forget about Control-Up and -Down.) And remember that you'll sometimes face more stringent matching restrictions if you are pasting to replace selected elements rather than pasting before or after them.

This does get easier to understand and predict with practice and familiarity, so don't despair, even if it often feels like voodoo to start with.

Finally, we suggest you explore the formatting buttons (bullet 5). These provide a semantically focused styling mechanism for identifying a span of text as a filename, a literal, a term being defined, and the like. While you can explicitly request emphasis for its own sake, it's usually better to mark up the text in a way that identifies exactly what it is, then your stylesheet can decide how to represent it in a way that is appropriate for your output medium and organizational standards. As you'll see when playing with it, that's the focus of the emphasis menu in XMLmind.

And keep in mind that not all useful style choices are available through these menus; for example, the keycap style is good for talking about keyboard commands, and there's no shortcut for it. An easy way to apply it is to select the word you want to style, then click the Convert [wrap] button (right next to bullet 3 in Figure 1), type K in the Edit tool underneath, and then Enter(or Return depending on your keyboard) to accept the keycap element (which will be the highlighted choice, since it's the first legal element whose name starts with k):

We're about to dive into deeper topics, but this should hopefully help you get started in a useful way. UNC-Chapel Hill also has a nice two-page introduction to using the editor, and of course you can use the built-in help to dig deeper into things we glossed over here.