Obtaining and using KompoZer
(Nvu with bugs fixed)
KompoZer (an offshot of Nvu) is a graphical-based HTML
editor. You will type the text and select
the HTML tags from tool bars to format your text and you imediately see
the results: it is also a WYSIWYG (what you see is
what you get) editor You can see here a
picture of the KompoZer screen below.:
You can obtain KompoZer
for Windows free.
It is an open source Web authoring tool available for Windows and Linux. As you can see in the above image it allows you to work
both in graphical and text modes, by just clicking on the tabs in the
bottom of the screen.
My recommendation for occasional Web site development is for
you
to use KompoZer in general and the free version of Homesite for
some special needs when working at the text (source) code.
Using KompoZer
You type the page content and format for the content by applying tags
available in the tool bar and/or using the pull-down menus
provided by Kompozer . You highlight the word, sentence,
etc, and
then click on the toolbar to place the tag around what you selected.
You do need need to know the HTML tag, KompoZer will know the
corresponding tag and apply it to the text and you will see immediately
the effect of the tag you used.
You can also spell-check, verify links, obtain HTML help,
preview your page in a browser, validate HTML, etc. Many
tags can be changed by right-clicking and choosing new values. You can
insert Images
(gif, jpg, etc files) by clicking in the image symbol and browsing for
the name of the file you want. But before you start using
Nvu, please do the following customization:
- right-click in the toolbar and select customize toolbar
- then drag and drop copy, paste and H.line (horizontal
line) in the toolbar (see the
result).
KompoZer has a very good User Manual installed, as a Help menu. There are, however, two of items that are not
intuitive in KompoZer:
- how to access a local directory to store Web site files.
Lets see an example:
- this tutorial is saved in drive K, 0cisnt directory, and
in the Nvu sub-directory
- we need to let KompoZer know this directory and
unfortunately there is no browse menu in the left side of the site-manager
as shown below
- we click on Edit sites symbol
and a dialog for publish settings
will open
- in the Local Settings we give the site name, in the example KompoZer, and
we browse to the directory Nvu in drive K, as
shown below.
- We can now see all my files in the site manager, as shown
in this other image.
- Of course, this same procedure could be used to upload
your pages to your Web space, but to be in the safe side I
suggest you upload your files using either ftp or , if you are at UB,
using the Web
interface provided by OTS.
- Why is it important to see your files in the site
manager? The reason is simple: you can drag and drop image files from
the left side directory in your documents and Nvu will create the tags
for you.
-
how to apply some HTML tags not visible in the
toolbar icons.
- There are no icons in the toolbar to allow you to force
KompoZer to to make a part of text a paragraph or a
heading,
- but there is a drop-down area, as
shown below, where you can maark a selected text as a
paragraph, header 1, etc.
-
Please also note that just under the Menu item Publish, there is
a black square, that after you select a text let you change the color
of the text font.
- Please also note that just under the black box there is another
drop-down area, of which in the above image we only see Width (Variable
Width) that after you select a text let you change the font of the text.
KompoZer has many useful features not easily found in other graphical
editors and generates clean HTML code, rather than XML or other
difficult to change source code. Its support for all basic tags, and
particularly tables and forms is outstanding. It does not support
directly frames and imagemaps, but can be used for most steps of these
two important navigation tools, and what cannot be done in graphical
mode, can be easily accomplished by selecting the source tab and
entering the necessary code directly.
This page is maintained by Al Bento
who can be reached at abento@ubalt.edu.
This page was last updated on September 27, 2009. Although we will attempt to
keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of
the information provided.
