Introduction to HotMetalPro

HotMetalPro's editor has three different views for editing and displaying a document:

1. "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG), which means that text and pictures are shown exactly as they would on the website.
2. An icon-based view where HTML-tags are displayed as icons.
3. HTML-view where text and HTML-tags can be edited as text.

The most utilised view is probably WYSIWYG, so this article will concentrate on giving the basics of this view.

For installation at home, you can either visit this site, or get a CD at Orakeltjenesten.

Where do I start?

HotMetalPro resembles Microsoft Word (as this is also a program based on WYSIWYG) in many ways, you open a new file with File->New->New Page, and you will get an interface similar to this:

If you want to change the view, you can either use the three first buttons highlighted with red or by choosing View in the toolbar and choose there. For this tutorial, choose WYSIWYG.

How do I add and edit text?

For editing text you can choose either to use the predefined styles like heading, paragraph, etc. Or you can choose to type in the text and change font, color, effects yourself. Just like in Microsoft Word.

How do I add picture?

To add a picture to your page, you choose Insert->Image in the toolbar and press the button Choose. There you can open your picture and add it. If you want display text when a mouse hovers over the picture, you can add this text by filling in the Alternate text-field. The option Alignment is used to give where on the page the picture will appear. When you are done, press OK.

Tips

Horizontal line

To add a horizontal line to your page you choose Insert->Horizental Rule in the toolbar. If you want to edit the length of this line you double-click it and enter the percentage of the page you want the line to 'cover'. To edit the width of the line you enter different values to the size-field. When you are done and happy with your horizontal line, press X to exit.

Links

To add a link to another website you choose Insert->Link in the toolbar. There you can fill out File or URL with the address and press OK.

Lists

Again, this works like Microsoft Word. You can choose between bullet or numbered list by clicking on their respective icons: , or by choosing Format->(Numbered/Bulleted) List in the toolbar.

And then?

When you are happy with way things look, save the document as an .html-file. If you want it to be your frontpage, save it as index.html and add it to the directory public_html in your home directory. If you cannot find the page at http://folk.ntnu.no/username, your permissions might be wrong. Read this article for help on how to fix this problem.