Tip: Good applications for editing configuration files

[Su-Laine Yeo]

XMetaL, and other applications used for XML processing such as the DITA Open Toolkit, can be can be customized by editing configuration files. A good text editor makes editing configuration files much easier.

Configuration files often have a .xml extension. On most Windows machines, .xml files open in Internet Explorer by default, which is almost never useful. You can also configure Windows to [url=http://forums.XMetaL.com/index.php/topic,213.0.html]open .xml files in XMetaL by default[/url]. XMetaL's Plain Text View is serviceable for editing configuration files, however it's not really designed for this.

A free text editor that we often use is Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/). If you have another favorite, please suggest it by replying to this post.

Multilingual Support
Many applications that are widely used for text editing do not display accented characters or non-Latin alphabets, at least not by default. If you will be editing strings files for languages other than English, be sure to use a text editor that displays the language correctly. If you see square boxes, or groups of symbols in the place of accented characters, you are probably using a text editor that either doesn't support Unicode, or is preconfigured to use a font which can't display characters for that language.

If you want to use the XMetaL Plain Text View to edit strings files for other languages, add the following line to the C:Program FilesXMetaL 6.0Authorxmetal60.ini file:
default_font_name = Arial Unicode MS . The next time you restart XMetaL, the Plain Text View will use the “Arial Unicode MS” font which displays most languages correctly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial_Unicode_MS). Arial Unicode MS is installed with Microsoft Office 2000 and up.

Other text editors that we have used for editing text in non-Latin alphabets are Dreamweaver and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Reply

[Author]

Posts