ITD 110-01L — Web Page Design I

PSPad Settings

As we discussed in class, you might find it helpful to use PSPad or another HTML-aware text editor instead of Notepad. This is not a requirement, but an hour spent mastering the features will probably be repaid many times over as you work on your class projects. Here are some settings you might find useful:

  1. Click on View on the top menu. (See Figure 1 below.) The settings here are toggles: clicking an option will turn it on if it's off or turn if off it it's on. (Unfortunately, the display doesn't show you the current state.) The options I turn on are Active Line, Syntax, Line Numbers, Special Chars, and Ruler.
  2. Click on Settings | Program Settings... | Editor - behaviour. I like having these options enabled: Auto Indent Mode, Highlight Matching Brackets, and Completion of chars ({[<"'.
  3. Set up PSPad so that it can display your web page easily in the various browsers. (See Figure 2.) Click on Settings | Highlighters Settings, then click on the tab for "External Applications". Then, for both HTML and XHTML, define several external programs (Firefox, Opera, IE, Chrome, Safari). For each one, enter the name of the browser into the "Name" field; click on the "..." button to browse to the executable file, most likely somewhere under c:\program files or \program files (x86); then click the "Add" button to save your entry.
  4. Set up PSPad with some default XHTML templates. Instead of typing them, you can download the templates from the class web site. Note that if you just click on the template links, the browser will attempt to display them. Instead, right-click on each one, then select the appropriate option for your browser to save the contents of the link on your system. You should copy these files into the PSPad template folder, which is probably something like c:\program files\pspad\template. Then, when creating a new XHTML file, click on File | New file..., then click on the Use Template tab, then click on the XHTML folder to see the choices. (See Figure 3.)
  5. You can adjust which prolog PSPad uses by default when creating new XHTML files. (By default, it goes with HTML 4.0!) The first step is to make a copy of the desired template — either the 1.0 Transitional or 1.0 Strict — named default.xhtml in that sane PSPad template folder. Then, within PSPad, click on Settings | Highlighter Settings | XHTML | Specification, and change the contents of the "File Masks:" box to read:
    *.xhtml
    *.html
    *.htm
    then click OK as needed. (See Figure 4.)

Figure 1
PSPad 'view' menu

Figure 2
PSPad XHTML external applications settings

Figure 3
Create new file in PSPad

Figure 4
Adjust default template for XHTML


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