foofAid

Why would we want a new formatting editor?

foofAid helps you format more easily, quickly, and accurately

• foofAid uses different colors and font styles for each kind of markup, so it's very easy to see exactly what's tagged:
  • italics, boldface, Small-Caps, special fonts, gesperrt, and even [paragraph-level tags]
• you can hide the in-line tags for a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) appearance, or show them when necessary:
  • like this, or <b>this</b>, or in DPCustomMono2
• foofAid lets you customize colors (and more) through user style sheets
• smart in-line formatting buttons automatically trim blanks on either side of a selection
• smart buttons for blocks and paragraphs automatically expand the selection to full paragraphs
• project-specific auto-formatting does repetitive work for you at the click of a button
• floating “tool-tips” explain the purpose of the buttons when the cursor hovers over them
• “Tag-check” looks for many common formatting errors, flags them in color and explains them
• clicking on some of those flags tells foofAid to fix the errors for you (if you agree they are errors)
• view page images and text in any round of any project, particularly F1, F2 and PP, to see how they were formatted
• remembers your settings and your last project each time it starts (if cookies or “local storage” are enabled)
• quickly zoom the image, including fit-to-screen and full-size views
• entirely written in HTML and JavaScript, so others can review and maintain it

Installation (one-time stuff) top

Prerequisites

• Firefox version 8 or later. You can install the latest version of Firefox from Mozilla
• a Firefox Addon to connect foofAid with DP.

Installing the Connection to DP (a Firefox Addon)

• foofAid communicates with DP through a Firefox addon that is active only when foofAid is running
• download the latest foofAid addon by clicking on this link and saving foofAid.xpi to your hard drive
  • the addon's most recent update was on August 18, 2015; it should be used with foofAid version 1.81 or later.
    • This version of the Addon works with Firefox version 40, and it has been "signed" by Mozilla, so it should continue to work with future versions of Firefox. (For improved security, beginning with version 42, Firefox only will accept "signed" addon's.)
• if your OS recognizes “.xpi”s as Firefox addons, you can install directly from that link without downloading it
• otherwise, use Firefox's “Open file” (Ctrl-O on Windows, Command-O on Mac) to find the addon where you downloaded it
• double-click the addon to “open” it
• when Firefox asks you whether or not it should be installed, click the “Install” button to complete the installation
• you only need to do this once (or when there's been an update), and may or may not have to restart Firefox afterwards.
  • when updating the addon, you do not have to remove the old one first
  • to uninstall the addon: go to Firefox's Add-on Manager (click the orange “Firefox” button, then click “Add-ons”) and click the “Remove” button to the right of “foofAid”
• Note: you can use foofAid's color-highlighting and error-checking without the addon by copying text from DP and pasting it into foofAid's “text” pane.

Installing foofAid (just bookmark a link to it)

• If you decide to keep using foofAid, you will want to keep a link to it in Firefox, probably right on the Bookmarks bar.
• Here's the link; use it while reading this in Firefox: foofAid (to bookmark this link, right-click it and select 'Bookmark this link'.)

Getting Started top

• Open foofAid in a Firefox browser tab, then open a DP page in another tab. For your convenience, foofAid has buttons that take you directly to the F1 and F2 Project Listings, the latest project you did with foofAid, and links to other parts of DP
• Once at DP, choose a project and select something to format as you normally would, e.g., “Start Proofreading”
• The Firefox addon is active only when foofAid is running and watches for only two kinds of DP pages: if you click on a link to format a page or view the text of a page, the addon reroutes it to foofAid automatically. Apart from this, DP and everything else will work normally

Formatting pages (“Live” formatting)

• click “Start Proofreading” to get the next available page in the project
• the page will open in foofAid instead of in the standard DP Formatting Interface and you will see that the mode under the foofAid logo reads “Edit” instead of “View”
  • the only difference between using foofAid as an Editor or a Viewer is that “Edit” lets you save pages back to DP; “View” doesn't
• you also can click on a page in the “Recent” lists of a Project page or an “Edit” link in Page Details to make revisions
• these are the same things you do when using the standard DP Formatting Interface
• to use the standard DP Interface while foofAid is running, just right-click on “Start Proofreading” or a Recent/Edit link and select “open in new tab” or “open in new window”

Saving and returning pages

• Before closing foofAid or Firefox, while still working on a “live” page, be sure to use “Save progress” or “Save & Stop”. Then, you can resume formatting it at another time by starting foofAid and selecting the page from the Project's “Recent” list or “Page Details”.
• foofAid's “Save & Stop” normally does not return you to the Project page, because you may want to continue formatting something else, and a foofAid tab must be available for that. So, when you're finally finished, just close the foofAid tab or window

Examining and reviewing pages (just looking, read-only)

• you can use foofAid to View almost any page in any Round in any DP Project
• to View a page, navigate to a project's Page Details and click the text link for the page/round you want to see
• foofAid will show its Image and Text, just as though you were doing “live” formatting
• you can use all of foofAid's features except for the “save”/“reload”/“return page” buttons, so besides seeing how other pages were formatted, you can practice formatting and use Tag-check for educational purposes
• the “Prev” and “Next” buttons let you browse through a project to see other pages (read-only)
• you can use these while doing “live” formatting: foofAid will save your “live” work until you click “return to editing”, then restore it to the screen
• to switch from Viewing to “live” formatting, use any of the methods described in Formatting pages, or the “Edit page” button, which appears when you are Viewing a page you've already done in the current formatting round

Exiting (quitting) foofAid

• if you're working on a “live” page, remember to save it (in progress or as done) before exiting foofAid. Then, close its window or tab
• When foofAid's not open in Firefox, the DP links that normally open the Proofing Interface will do just that. Unless …

Making foofAid the default Editor

Normally, if foofAid isn't open, “Start Proofreading” (and the “Recent” list and “Edit” in Page Details) will use the standard DP interface. If you want it to use foofAid even when foofAid isn't already running:

• click Preferences at the top of the screen and select “Use foofAid as the default editor”.
• you still can use the standard DP interface at any time by right-clicking “Start Proofreading” etc.
• this default only applies to the formatting rounds; “Start Proofreading” in one of the P* rounds always uses the standard interface

(If you know how to format with the standard DP Proofreading Interface, you can use most of foofAid without reading any further. If you're new to DP's way of formatting or want to learn about foofAid's shortcuts and extra features, you'll want to continue….)

Formatting with foofAid top

OK, you've selected a page and it's on the screen. What next?

Look through the Image for things that need to be tagged or spaced in the Text, and use the formatting buttons to create the tags:

• The in-line formatting buttons (italics, bold, small-caps, gesperrt, and font change) place appropriate tags around text you've selected. To help you avoid errors, they:
  • adjust the selection to not include leading or trailing spaces
  • make sure you aren't duplicating existing tags
  • surround the selected text with the chosen in-line tags
    • if the selected text already contains the same in-line tags, the old ones are removed. This only works when you are expanding an already-tagged selection, not when you're shrinking it
  • tint the text and background of the selection with colors unique to the tag, and show the text in italics, boldface, small-caps, or gesperrt. ‘Font change’ just gets a tint, and all upper-case small-caps are shown in upper-case so they won't look like all lower-case
  • you usually can re-apply the last in-line tag by highlighting some other text and then right-clicking within it, without having to click the button again
    • by default, foofAid uses right-click this way, so the usual “cut/copy/paste” pop-up menu will not appear. Instead, you can use the normal keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V
      • an option on the Preferences menu lets you use right-click to show the pop-up menu instead
    • when the cursor is in or next to a word and no text is selected, clicking an in-line formatting button will tag that word
    • foofAid also supports formatting-specific keyboard shortcuts in the form “Alt-x” (where “x” is a key). See the Preferences menu for details
  • you may have noticed that foofAid has not one, but three buttons for marking small-caps. Besides adding the tags:
    • SC—changes the selected text to all upper-case
    • Sc—converts the selection to Proper Case (see the standard Ab button, below, for details)
      • no computer program, and certainly not this one, will always match the Cases used in the Images, so you absolutely, positively must check the results against the scan and make necessary changes. This particularly applies to headings
    • sc—does not change Case. This is different from the behavior of the ab button
  • if a word or phrase requiring in-line tagging appears several times on the page, put a checkmark on “All” before clicking any of these buttons, and it will tag every occurrence of what you've selected
    • you must check the results against the image to make sure all of those occurrences actually needed to be tagged
    • this is just a “search & replace”, so if the selected word appears within another word (“the” in “then”) it'll be tagged there, too. That's another reason to check the results carefully
• The paragraph formatting buttons (illustration, sidenote, footnote, no-wrap, block quote) place appropriate tags around entire paragraphs:
  • to tag a single paragraph, just click anyplace in it and then click any of these buttons. foofAid will find the start and end of the paragraph for you and enclose it in the tags you've chosen
  • to tag several paragraphs, highlight a selection that begins in the first one and ends in the last one, then click one of these buttons. foofAid will expand the selection to the paragraph breaks and add the tags
  • when you don't want foofAid to expand a selection, select (highlight) full lines, as you would do with the standard DP interface
    • this is needed when there are no blank lines to show foofAid where to stop, such as when adding no-wrap tags within block-quote tags
  • if the page uses letters for footnotes [*], clicking the [Footnote] button while holding down the Alt key (Alt-click) will sequentially replace all of the bracketed asterisks with letters [A], [B], etc., then replace the paragraphs beginning with asterisks at the bottom of the page with [Footnote A: text], [Footnote B: text], etc.
    • this only applies to pages containing at least one [*], and the cursor doesn't have to be on any of them
    • when a footnote contains several paragraphs, this feature places the closing bracket at the end of the first paragraph, so you will have to move it to the end of the final paragraph
    • you must check the results to make sure they were done correctly
  • to insert a Thought Break between paragraphs, position the cursor on a blank line and click <tb>. It will add surrounding blank lines as needed
• The other standard buttons, lists, and links perform these functions:
  • Delete tags—removes tags within the selected text
    • normal (left) click on the button—removes all in-line tags
    • Ctrl-click—removes all out-of-line (paragraph-type) tags and associated brackets
    • Alt-click—removes both kinds of tags
  • AB—changes the selected text to all upper-case
  • Ab—makes the selected text follow Proper Case conventions (first letter of most words capitalized). It's fairly smart, but you will have to check the results to make sure they match the Image
  • ab—changes the selected text to all lower-case
  • Symbols—displays the Latin-1 characters that are not on the keyboard (ASCII 161–255). If you click on one of them, it will replace the selected text on the page, or insert the clicked character at the cursor if no text was selected
    • if you decide not to select a symbol, just click the button again and the chart will go away
  • Undo—reverses the last change. It can go back 99 times if necessary. Ctrl-Z does the same thing
  • the links across the top of the page will open a new Tab to take you to the pages they name:
    • the Formatting Guidelines are the penultimate authority on proper formatting
    • the Project's Comments are the final authority for that project
      • if you have questions, ask them in the Project Discussion or the Forums
      • If you are working in F1, please be aware that most people got into F2 by asking lots of questions … and they still do
    • the Library of Formatting Examples is just that: hundreds of commented examples
    • Table Maker—a companion utility for foofAid, with its own built-in Help

Extra Features top

So far, foofAid's features have been very similar to the ones in the standard DP Proofreading Interface, with just an occasional extra capability. Here are the “extras”:

• Status—briefly displays various messages about the results of certain things you've done
• Page—the page number is a clickable link:
  • if you want to reference the current page in a message, right-click on this page number, choose “copy link location”, then go to the Project Discussion or a Forum and paste the link into your message (preferably using the [URL] button there)
  • if you want to see the page Image in DP's standard Page Viewer, just click the page number
• Image controls are to the right of the Image:
  • Full page uses most of the screen to let you see the overall structure of the page
    • ordinary left-click shows large thumbnails of the entire Image and Text, side-by-side. It's similar to the “Big Eye” of the standard interface
      • this is useful for deciding where to place Illustrations and Sidenotes, what needs to be in block quotes or no-wrap, and where Chapter, Section, or Thought Breaks occur
      • this is not useful when looking for text requiring in-line tagging: for that, you want the image to be full size or magnified
    • Ctrl-click shows the image in its full size, usually with scroll bars. This is similar to what you will see if you click the page number to use DP's standard Image Viewer. When an Image is wider than it is tall, this is the only view available.
    • Full page is a toggle button: when its caption is Normal, click it to return the screen to its normal appearance
  • +, −, and 1 are zoom buttons. Each click of + increases the Image size by 25%; each click of − decreases it by 25%, and 1 turns zoom off, showing the Image in its original size
  • % of screen lets you allocate screen height to the Image pane. The range is 25%–70% and the suggested default is 45 (45% to the Image, 55% to the Text). It's easier to find in-line formatting in a shorter pane than a taller one
  • Autofit zooms the image so that it fits the width of the Image pane. It's most useful with older narrow-screen monitors and unusually wide Images that otherwise would have to be horizontally scrolled, but it also will magnify narrow Images; on a wide-screen monitor, Autofit may magnify normal pages excessively
  • Prev, Next, Page, and Mine let you “View” other pages in the current project in read-only mode
    • if you use them while doing “live” formatting, foofAid will save your “live” work until you click “return to editing”, then restore the “live” work to the screen, including any changes you had made before viewing the other pages
    • Prev/Next move one page forward or back; Page is the entire list for the project; and Mine is “Just My Pages”
      • Ctrl-Next lets you preview the next page available for editing in the current project (if there is such a page)
    • the dropdown lists are not always available
  • and a shortcut: if the option is selected on the Preferences menu, the image scrolls when you click it, just as though you had clicked its scrollbar. If it's at the bottom, it'll wrap around to the top of the image. If “sync scrolling” is in use (see below), the text will scroll along with the image
    • Note: the “click” must be on the actual image, not in the unused gray area (if any) between the image and its scrollbar
• Text controls are to the right of the text:
  • you can choose a preferred font and font size; “DPCustom” usually is the best one to use if it's on your computer
    • You can learn more about the DPCustomMono2 font and install it from THIS DP page
  • Sync scrolling makes the text scroll as you scroll the Image, so you usually won't have to scroll one and then the other. Scrolling the text does not scroll the Image, so you can fine-tune the position if necessary
    • “sync” works well for most normal pages, but is not suitable for multi-column ones such as indexes and magazines
• Search (and Replace)—lets you search for text on the page, and change it
  • when you click this button, a S&R bar will appear mid-screen. When you're done with it, click its “Done” button or click the “Search” button again
  • “Search” is case-independent unless you use the “Case” option for a case-sensitive search
  • you can represent the “Enter” key as: \n without using “Regex”
  • there's no need to represent the “Tab” character, because foofAid replaces each one with a space
  • if you know how to use them, you can search with regular expressions by checking the “Regex” option
  • S&R remembers the most recent 25 searches for each project, even across sessions
    • each project has its own search history
    • the most recent search is always at the top of the history list and in the current settings
    • the “History” button has options to let you manage the content of its list
• Show tags/Hide tags—displays/hides the in-line formatting tags
  • this is a toggle button: when it's showing tags, the caption will be “Hide tags”, and an “Analyse” option will be available
  • when the “Analyse” option is ON (that's the default), various conditions will be found and flagged in colors by the Tag-check feature described below. As you make changes and corrections, Tag-check will update the flags whenever you stop typing
  • when “Analyse” is OFF, you'll see the tags but not the flags
  • when tags are hidden, the button's caption will be “Show tags” and the screen will display a wysiwyg representation of the page
    • if “Analyse” is ON when tags are hidden, and Tag-check detects anything, the “Show tags” button will be shaded pink. You can ignore it or click the button to see what was detected
  • Table Alignment--foofAid is not designed to show column alignment when tables contain in-line tags. Use either "Table Maker" or the "Column Alignment Tool" (CAT); links to both are at the top of the foofAid page.
  • Both of these utilities expect the text to be on the correct lines. If the text for each "cell" of a table is against the left margin, rather than in columns, it'll be necessary to move the text to the correct rows before doing anything else. Text editors with "Block move" capabilities can make this easier. (foofAid does not have such features.)
  • Use Table Maker when the text is in the correct rows and there are at least 2 spaces between each column on each line.
  • Use CAT when the text looks like a table but is not perfectly aligned.
  • Further information about Table Maker and CAT may be found in the Tool Development section of the DP Forums.
  • Caution: When tags are hidden, it is not safe to make changes that may affect existing in-line tags, because you can't see them. It is safe to use the in-line buttons to add tags, and if you're careful about making selections, it's usually safe to use the “Delete tags” button when the tags are hidden.
• Other / Miscellaneous
  
  • When foofAid is in View mode with no "live" pages, you can paste a link to a Project or a page into the text area:
    
    • a link to a specific page will display that page in View mode
    • a link to a DP Project will display the first page available for editing in that project (if there is one) or the first page of the project
• Preferences Menu—“Preferences” at the top of the screen lets you select several additional options that you probably won't change too often. Most have been described elsewhere; this summarizes some of them:
  • Autoformats: the first section of this menu lets you build an Autoformats list that is unique to each Project.  This feature can help automate repetitive formatting in certain kinds of projects, such as legal Testimony, where witnesses' names are in small-caps at the beginning of many lines. Since this performs a simple “Search & replace”, it may format occurrences that were not formatted in the Image, so you always must check the results after using it.
    • you can type a word (or phrase) into the “Add new item” box, (or)
    • highlight a word (or phrase) in the text and click the “use selected text” button
    • then, choose the appropriate in-line formatting from the drop-down list. Note that all three kinds of small-caps are in the list, so use the appropriate one (usually “Smallcap”, which is Proper Case)
    • finally, click “Add” to add all of this to the Autoformats list in the larger box on the left of the menu bar
    • you can add as many items as necessary, and can edit the list directly in the large box
    • when the list is complete, click “Done (hide these options)”. foofAid will remember each Project's list, even across sessions
    • after clicking “Done”, click “Apply” to use your list on the current page
    • the second part of Autoformat applies your autoformats when you click the “Autoformat” button above the Text pane. If you've created autoformats for the current project, you can click this when you begin each new page, and every occurrence of every entry in the current Autoformats list will be tagged as specified
    • “Autoformats” is project-specific: the list from one project is not carried over to any others
  • Default Editor—when selected, foofAid will run when you “Start Proofreading” or re-edit a page of your own, even if foofAid isn't already open in a Firefox tab
  • Keyboard shortcuts—when selected, you can use several keyboard shortcuts in the form “Alt-x” (where “x” is a letter or number). When this is in use, pressing Alt-A will display those shortcuts
    • when the Ruler (alt-r) is visible, clicking on it toggles a vertical guideline
  • Right-click on selected text—by default, this re-uses the most recent in-line tag button, because that is such a common formatting activity. If you prefer right-click to show the standard pop-up menu instead, turn this option off
  • you can change the Background color of the text area to a variety of light pastels or white
  • “Shading” lets you choose how marked text will be highlighted in colors: color the text itself, or just its background, both, or neither. It's much easier to see the markups when you use some form of highlighting
  • Error detection—lets you select certain options for reporting possible errors
• Tag-check—a foofer's version of “WordCheck”
  • when you tell foofAid to “Show tags” and “Analyse” the text:
    • it flags some common formatting errors in red (“probable error”)
    • or in violet (“possible error”)
    • and highlights in yellow most correctly-placed punctuation adjacent to in-line tags
      • punctuation at the end of italics is not shaded if the shading might obscure the text just to its left
    • '<' and '>' symbols that are not parts of valid tags are highlighted in darker yellow
    • Tag-check does not look for misplaced periods
    • When Tag-check is active, it also displays a count of how many issues it found
      • it doesn't find everything
      • not everything it finds is an error
      • Tag-check's analyses are based on the Formatting Guidelines, not on Project-specific special instructions
      • the count may differ from the number of visible flags if there's more than one error in the same location
      • some errors will raise temporary flags in other places, until you fix the primary error
      • some flags have to be shown next to the problem, instead of on it (there's no “there” in a blank line)
    • hovering the cursor over a red or violet flag will show an explanation of the issue
    • A list of all messages is HERE
    • Shift-clicking on most red or violet flags tells Tag-check to suppress flagging this issue for the rest of this project. It's mostly for use with specific abbreviations that sometimes are in italics or small-caps, but may be used with almost anything that you know is not an error in a particular project
      • “Suppress” is project-specific
      • you can clear the list and enable all error-checking by clicking “Clear the ‘suppress errors’ list” on the Preferences menu
  • FixIt—if the Tag-check explanation begins with a + sign, foofAid can help you fix the error:
    • Ctrl-clicking on a red or violet flag corrects this occurrence of the error (hold down the Control key and mouse-click on the flag)
    • Alt-clicking on a red or violet flag corrects all occurrences of the same kind of error on the page
    • It is your responsibility to make sure the flagged conditions actually are errors and that the automatic fix produced the correct result. Tag-check does not find all errors, will flag some things that are not errors, and doesn't know about Project-specific instructions. These tools are intended to make formatting quicker and easier for people who know how to format; they are not replacements for thinking about what you are doing.
    • if you Ctrl-click on yellow-flagged punctuation, FixIt will move the symbol to the other side of the in-line tag. Then, Tag-check usually will flag the result as an error, so only move such punctuation when you know it belongs in an unusual position.
    • when punctuation at the end of italics is unshaded, it can still be moved with Ctrl-click
    • under certain conditions, if you Ctrl-click on a block tag (/# or #/, /* or */), FixIt will change it and its mate to the other type of block tag.
      Conditions: tags must be showing, “Analyse” must be checked, and block tags must be shaded but not error-flagged

FAQ top

Q: Can I change how things look? What if I don't like the default colors? What if I want bigger buttons? What if I want something else to just look different?

A: foofAid's interface is highly customizable through user style sheets HERE. Frau Sma has written a tutorial on user-styling and will gladly answer questions about this by PM.

Q: How does foofAid connect with DP? Why does it need an addon? Is it a hack?

A: The Firefox addon communicates with DP by sending the same page requests that the standard Proofing Interface buttons use. In other words, to DP, the addon is just another user. This means that foofAid is not a hack, it hasn't modified anything at DP, and it operates under the same rules as any user. It needs the addon because it's written in JavaScript and cannot communicate with DP by itself.

Q: How do I turn foofAid off?

A: Close foofAid, and the addon will allow the normal page editor to operate.

Q: Can I use foofAid in another browser than Firefox?

A: Not at present, because the addon is required to communicate with DP, and it is specific to Firefox. If we had a budget of millions (or, if we had any budget at all) we might have a go at Internet Explorer, but not right now. This has been hard enough. (Translation: if we had known what we were getting into, we never would have done it.) We certainly will welcome volunteers who can port the addon to other browsers. The source code for the addon is HERE (it's also inside foofaid.xpi as 'main.js' ... change 'xpi' to 'zip' to access it) and HERE; the JavaScripts are HERE (main) and HERE (tag-check).

Q: Can I use foofAid at DP Canada, DP Europe, or anywhere else?

A: Not at present, because the addon currently only knows how to communicate with DP.

Q: Why isn't foofAid remembering my screen settings?

A: Normally, your settings are stored in the browser's “local storage”. If you have disabled or restricted that capability, they are stored as “cookies”. If you've disabled both local storage and cookies in Firefox, the settings won't be available the next time you use foofAid. foofAid doesn't use “tracking cookies” or anything else, and there's nothing at the foofAid website to receive the content of cookies.

Q: Why can't foofAid edit some projects that the DP interface can edit?

A: One possibility is that their page images were stored as .jpg instead of .png. The latter is DP's standard, and is the only image type recognized by foofAid; it cannot accept .jpg's.

Q: Why does foofAid's error-checking flag footnotes that are a mix of numbers and letters (symbols)?

A: Figuring out how to do that is beyond the capabilities of the junior co-author (who wrote the "analysis" part), and it's a situation that occurs only rarely. However, we will welcome a contribution of working JavaScript that supports that capability.

Q: How do I report any ideas/comments/problems/bugs?

A: Please use the "foofAid" discussion thread in the DP Forums' "Tools Development" area.
When reporting a bug, please be as specific and detailed as possible, because if we can't repeat it, we can't fix it. Please include the Project, Round, Page, and exactly what you were trying to do with what text on that page.