View/Edit Front Matter in Peripherals

Question

I’m using 2.1.19
In the Peripherals tab, when you click on View/Edit Front Matter, why would someone need to click on the additional View/Edit button to open up the front matter in a .txt file? What’s the difference between editing the front matter in the main window versus in another program? I realize that some people may have a particular program they would want to use for this purpose, but my main concern is if there is any problem with editing it in the main window.

Answer 1

There are several reasons for having a View/Edit button in our (rather limited) editor:

a) Our editor has a limited line capacity, so extremely long files get truncated – so you need to use an external editor to even view the end of those files (error logs for example, or even the Final SFM file)
b) AFAIK you can’t zoom in on the text, and some non-roman fonts/scripts appear too small to read easily, so people often open the file in their preferred editor
c) Other editors allow a whole host of editing power (keyboard shortcuts, find-n-replace, and even RegEx capability) which we don’t plan to offer in our rather basic viewer.

However, if you are using an external editor to edit settings, you do need to be careful to save (in the external program) and then refresh the file (withing PTXprint) before you save. Otherwise you are likely to lose your changes.

Comments

Thanks for that very helpful explanation. I wonder if that last point you made about making sure to refresh the file within PTXPrint after editing in an external program is a tip that should be included in the pop-up help window for View/Edit… Or maybe power users would know that anyway.

Answer 2

Thanks for that helpful advice. Done: