NETSCAPE COMPOSER

FULLY INTEGRATED, WEB DOCUMENT-AUTHORING TOOL

Netscape Composer is an easy-to-use tool that makes creating HTML-based documents as easy as writing a memo with a word processor. HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, describes how words and images should be displayed on a web page or in an email message. Like a word processor, Composer uses fonts, styles, paragraphs, and lists, and includes an integrated spelling checker.

Composer publishes, or uploads, documents to an intranet or Internet document server with a single button click. Because Composer is fully integrated with other Netscape Communicator components, Composer documents can be sent or displayed using Netscape Messenger, Netscape Conference, and Netscape Collabra.

About Composer

Netscape Composer integrates powerful What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) document creation capabilities into Netscape Communicator's already rich set of World Wide Web features. In addition to electronic mail, threaded discussion group, and file transfer features included in Communicator, Composer makes composing for the Web, email, or newsgroups a simple cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop process.

The document creation capabilities in Composer are designed to provide both experienced and beginning content creators with a simple yet powerful solution for editing and publishing online documents. WYSIWYG editing allows first-time users to create dynamic online documents easily and publish them to local file systems and remote servers with ease.

There are a lot of things you can do with Composer:

• Work in a WYSIWYG environment. You can see the results of paragraph and font tags applied as you type.
• Add, remove and modify text. Click on any part of a downloaded Web page and immediately work with text and images.
• Drag-and-Drop. Drag-and-drop hyperlinks and images from the bookmark, mail, news, or browse windows, to a document in the editor (Windows and MacOS only). You can also drag an HTML or image file from the Windows File Manager (Explorer in Windows 95) and drop it in an edit window.
• Publish your documents on the Internet. Simplify the process of posting pages to a server by using one button to copy your files from your local hard disk to a remote directory or server.
• Format text to suit your needs. You can apply paragraph and character styles to text just as you would in your favorite word-processing application.
• Change font, font size and color. Use these features to create pages that focus a reader's attention where you want.
• Include objects in your pages. You can insert tables, images, horizontal lines, and hyperlinks in the Web documents you create.

Starting Composer

You can create a Web document from scratch, edit the page you're browsing, or open an existing document that you want to modify.

Creating a New Document
Editing the Page You're Browsing
Editing an Existing Page
Composer Preferences - Publish
Using FTP

Creating a New Page

• From the File menu, choose New and then choose Blank Page (Blank on MacOS). Or, click the Composer button (pencil button) on the Component bar. A Composer window opens containing a blank page. The original browse window remains open behind the Composer window.
• From the File menu, choose New and then choose Page From Template. A dialog box appears where you can select a remote or local file to use as a template, or one of the template files available from the Netscape Template Web site. Once you've selected a template, choose Edit Page from the File menu to use the template as the basis for a new document.
• From the File menu, choose New and then choose Page From Wizard. A Navigator window opens containing the Page wizard. The wizard is a special page on the Netscape home site that walks you through the steps for creating a Web page. When you've completed the steps, you'll have a page that you can open in Composer and continue building on as your skills improve.

Note: The Netscape Template Web Site and Page wizard are located on the Netscape home site. To access them, you must be connected to the Internet.

Editing the Page You're Browsing

To edit the page (or frame) you're currently browsing:

• Choose Edit Page or Edit Frame from the File menu. The current Navigator window becomes a Composer window containing the document you were viewing. You can also drag the Location icon and drop it on the Component bar

Editing an Existing Page

To edit an existing page saved locally or in a remote location:

1. Choose Open Page (Open Page...in Composer on MacOS) from the File menu in Composer.
   
   You see a dialog box where you can enter the filename or URL of the page you want to edit.
2. Select the file you want, click Composer, then click Open.
3. A Composer window opens containing the specified file.

Composer Preferences - Publish

Use the items in the Publish panel of Composer Preferences to specify settings for saving remote documents, such as whether to maintain links or copy image files to the remote locations. You can also indicate the default FTP or HTTP publishing locations for your documents.

Maintain links

Select this to make sure that links are kept relative to the current document's location. When saving a document from a remote server to your local disk, or publishing to a remote server, this option insures that any links in that document to other files in the same directory are relative when saved/published. These links will work locally if you've also saved the remote files they pointed to. Links to files outside the document's directory are absolute. If you do not select this option, link path names are not modified and links local to the saved document may no longer work.

Keep images with page

Select this to save a copy of each image file in the same location as the document. Since images are not located in the document itself, deselecting this option means that only the HTML document is saved, not the image files. It is recommended that you leave this option selected, so that your document's images are always kept in the same directory as that document.

Enter a FTP site address to publish to:

• FTP: Enter the default location to which you want to upload your Web pages using the File Transfer Protocol. The URL in this box look like this: ftp://ftp.bee.net

Using FTP

You can also use FTP to transfer (or upload) your files to a Web server. Composer lets you access FTP servers in the same way you access Web (HTTP) servers.

Note: Most FTP client software lets you choose either ASCII text or binary transfer mode. Although HTML files themselves can be transferred as text files, other files, such as JPEG and GIF files, cannot be correctly transferred that way. In the Composer, files are uploaded to FTP sites in binary mode by default. To point Composer to an FTP site, use the following syntax in the location field:

ftp://ftp.bee.net

You might find the FTP directory and content pages have minimal formatting. When possible, the browse window shows the type, size, date, and a short description of each file in a directory. A directory is presented as a list of links; each link is often preceded by a small icon indicating another directory or a file. Clicking on a directory link displays a subdirectory. Typically, at the top of a subdirectory is a link that displays the parent directory.

After you have accessed an FTP server, you can upload files to the site by dragging and dropping them from the Windows File Manager or Explorer to the browse window. This process is easier if all your Web page files are located in one directory on your local disk.

Bee.Net 56 E. Uwchlan Ave., #239 Exton, PA 19341 1-610-280-2274 phone 1-610-280-2276 fax 1-888-4BeeNet [email protected]

Last updated March 9, 1998
Copyright © 1996, 1997 Bee Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.
Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.