Greg, Ted,
In trying to come up with an efficient manner to transfer what is created in a Jarte word-processing document and put it in a reply in the MLS editor, following is a description the process that I've devised. While from the following explanation of what I've come up with, it may seem very complicated. The fact is, it takes a great many words to explain something fairly simple and that takes but a few seconds to actually perform once understood.
In the testing I was using the basic Jarte program (i.e. v3.3), not the Jarte Plus version, but in looking at the stated differences between the two programs I don't see where that should really make a difference. As an aside, Jarte uses the IRun v1.22 RTF-to- XML/HTML application extension (i.e. a .dll file extension) by Pilot Software Ltd. to do the export function.
First off, in looking at how an image is stored in Jarte, unlike say MS/Word there is no record stored internally in the document that an image was pasted in from an on line source, locally from some location on the users system, or created from within the document. The image is actually stored within the document without any reference to where it originally came from. It's assigned an internal ID by the Jarte application so that the correct image can be retrieved from its storage location within the document file and placed in the correct position within the document when viewed and/or printed. So attempting to simply copy and paste an image from a Jarte document into the MLS editor will result in the little square with a red x in it.
The best way to deal with images that you want to transfer from a Jarte document into the MLS editor, is to include the image's URL in the Jarte document, in the position you want the image to appear. The previous statement assumes of course that the image files are already uploaded to a server (e.g. MLS 1st Class Web Space). If the images are still located on your local system then substitute the local path to the file for the URL. That way it will be easier when using the '
Upload' feature available within both the '
Image Gallery' & '
Insert Image' dialogs. If it makes it easier for you to write the commentary you can also include the actual image in the Jarte document, but it will cause you more work later on when creating your reply in the editor.
Second, in testing for the best way to maintain the formatting of the textual portion of the document. I've tried simply copying and pasting text from a Jarte document into various HTML WYSIWYG editors including the MLS editor and the results have remained pretty much the same, basically not very good. Which to me, points more to an inadequacy in Jarte than in the respective editors. Then again, that's one of the wonderful things about '
standards' there are so many to choose from (e.g. HTML v4.01, HTML v5.0, XHTML v1.0 etc. etc.), and then there's always the various manners in which any given standard can be interpreted and implemented by someone.
The best method that I've discovered to maintain the text formatting entails a bit more work, but it does accurately retain the text formatting. On the Jarte
File menu, there is the
Save Other > Export As HTML... option. Using this option and creating a HTML document file from the Jarte word processing document, then using Jarte itself to open the HTML document, copying the required HTML code and finally pasting the copied HTML code into the MLS editor's content area while in the HTML view. Has thus far in my testing accurately kept the text formatting intact.
Before starting the process, I would suggest that you create a '
Working Folder' where you can temporarily store the intermediate files and such. So that when you're done it's easy to get rid of every thing. This step gains more importance as the number of actual images you include in the Jarte word-processing document. This is because when you export the Jarte document to the HTML format, every image is extracted and placed in its own stand alone file in the same folder that you create the HTML document.
The following is a step-by-step description of the process.
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Step One: Create your Jarte document.
Notice that in this example I've kept things simple. There's only three lines of text with a blank line between them. Mainly that's to keep everything visible in the example screen shots. As usual it's a good idea to save the original before going to far.
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Step Two: Export the Jarte word-processing document in HTML format.
To export the document, point to the
File menu button, after the menu displays point to the
Save Other item, finally point to and left-click the
Export As HTML... option. Next, the normal
Save As dialog displays, navigate to the '
working folder' you created earlier. Give the file a name, in this case it has to be a single word name and if you use the drop-down list you'll see the Jarte will suggest the addition of a '
.lnk' suffix. Note this isn't the file extension which will be '
.htm' which you may or may not see depending on how you've got your system configured (assuming some flavor of MS/Windows).
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Step Three: The new HTML document is displayed in a browser window.
This step is automatically taken by Jarte, a new browser window is opened displaying the new HTML document so you can see what it looks like. All that you really need to do is just close the browser window.
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Step Four: Open the HTML document and copy required HTML code.
Next, on a new tab we open the HTML document with Jarte. Since we've kept everything real simple we can see the complete HTML document's code within the above screen shot. All we need to do is select all of the text between the two data tags (i.e. the two items highlighted in red). In the normal course of events there will likely be much more code found between these two tags, but the process remains the same. After selecting the required text just right-click somewhere within the blue shaded area and when the menu displays left-click the
Copy option.
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Step Five: Paste the copied HTML code into the MLS editor.
Next, we switch to the browser window that has the MLS editor displayed in it. If you didn't already have this done just go ahead and open a new browser window and navigate to the editor as required (i.e. Add Topic, Add Reply etc.etc.).
Since by default when the editor opens its in the
Normal View mode. The first thing that we need to do is switch the editor to the
HTML View mode, next right-click anywhere within the editor's content area, finally when the menu displays point to and left-click the
Paste option. After which you'll see all of the HTML code that you copied from the Jarte HTML document displayed in the editor's content area.
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Step Six: Switch to the Normal View mode.
Next we need to switch the editor back to the
Normal View mode so we can finish editing the reply and have it ready for posting, so left-click the Normal button located in the lower-left of the editor. After the window refreshes select the text of the URL, right-click somewhere within the blue area, and after the menu displays left-click the Copy option.
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Step Seven: Replace the image URL with the actual image.
To replace the image
URL with the actual image, first off make sure that you've left the text of the URL selected, then left-click the
Insert Image button on the editor's tool bar, after the dialog displays right-click in the
URL Field and when the menu displays left-click the
Paste option. This will place the image's address in the field, the image will be displayed in the
Image Viewing Pane, and the width & height values will be filled in. All that's left is to left-click the
Insert button located in the bottom of the dialog.
If you are working with images that haven't as yet been uploaded to your 1st Class web space on the MLS server. Then instead of the image's URL address you'll be looking at the
path on your local system to where the actual image file is located (previously included in your Jarte document). In this case, you'll left-click the
Upload button in the dialog. Then when the
Open/Choose File dialog displays use the path listed to navigate to the desired image file, finally double-click the file name and the image will be uploaded to the MLS server.
Since only one file at a time can uploaded to the MLS server using either the Image Gallery or Insert Image functions. If you have many images to up load, I would suggest that you take the time to setup and configure an FTP (File Transport Protocol) connection, it'll make uploading multiple files a lot easier.
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Step Eight: Confirm the image has replaced URL link.
After clicking the
Insert button in the above step, the
Insert Image dialog clears and focus is returned to the editor's content area. As can be seen in the above screen shot the actual image has in fact replaced the original URL text. In a longer document that contains more links to additional images, simply scroll down through the document and for each image URL address just repeat the process described in Step Seven.
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Step Nine: Preview the reply.
Actually the procedure was complete in the above step and all the needed to be done was to left- click the
Submit button located in the lower-left of the window. However, you can preview the reply and I decided to use this preview to demonstrate that the format had been maintained (i.e. three lines of content with a single blank line between), now we click the Submit button.
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Step Ten: Review the posted topic.
The above screen shot shows the completed reply posted to the topic without any changes to the document's intended layout.
[/list] Hope you find the above of use.
SteveC