Blog: WhizFolders, Articles and tips

WhizFolders must be using RichEdit 4.1 in order to allow unicode. You can make sure whether WhizFolders  is using RichEdit 4.1 by clicking on the menu Help–About and then see the report on the button Status. It shows the RichEdit version in use. It should be 4.1. If it isn’t, you need to follow these steps to switch it on:

• Click on the menu Tools–General Options–Editor.
• Switch on the last option that enables use of RichEdit 4.1 (msftedit.dll).
• Click OK to finish the options dialog.
• Exit WhizFolders by the menu File–Exit.
• Restart it and again check on the Help–About–Status whether RichEdit 4.1 was really switched on.

Smart quotes is a feature of Microsoft RichEdit control that WhizFolders uses for its editor. You can turn smart quotes on or off by keys Ctrl-Shift-’.

For other such key combinations, please see the following table that we borrowed from the Microsoft documentation. IMPORTANT NOTE: All of them may not work as some may have been assigned to the menus to trigger menu actions in WhizFolders.

Sure, you can. If you don’t find your favorite color in the “Text Color,” “Window Color” or “Highlight Color” drop-downs, here are the steps to define and use a custom color.

1. Find the “…” button on the Editor next to a color drop down, circled in red in the following picture.
    
2. Click on the “…” button. It opens a color selection dialog box. If the dialog does not show color shade selection on the right, click on the button “Define Custom Colors” at the bottom. The dialog extends to the right to show the color shades selection.
   
3. In the above dialog, you can see different shades of colors on the right. Just click on the one, which you like. You can adjust the lighter or darker shade by moving the arrow (circled in Red) on the slider provided in the right-most part of the dialog. Now click on “Add to Custom Colors” button. The selected color shade will be added in the list of Custom Colors (circled in Blue) and is selected. Click on OK and this custom color will be used.
4. The best part is that WhizFolders will remember this Custom Colors list. Next time, you do not need to go through the selection process for using this particular color. Just select it from the Custom Colors list by clicking on it.

Tip: WhizFolders adds another convenience feature. For any drop down, if you just want to use the color that you used last, you don’t need to even select it. Just click on the “Last use” button before that drop down. For example, the button is for using the “Last Highlight Color.”

A tool like that is already there on the Editor but works in a different way. It is called Pick and Apply format. You will find two different buttons on the editor toolbar, one to pick a format and other to apply it. This way, you can pick a format from some selected text and go on applying this format to another selected text. The picked format is remembered for the session till you pick another format.

There is also a feature to include the paragraph properties in the picked format. But you have to put on that option. It is off by default. You will find it in the General Options–Editor.

Update Note:We have fixed this problem in WhizFolders 6.1 so that it doesn’t appear for continuation of lists at different levels.

Known problem in WhizFolders 6.0 and earlier: This is a known problem in the Microsoft Richedit control. We have given a workaround in the advanced editor.

1. Open that topic in the advanced editor (pen icon).
2. Put the cursor on the number list item with the wrong number.
3. Click on the menu “Format–Paragraph–Change starting number” and enter the desired continuation number.

This means that the OLE stuff that is responsible for showing an embedded picture is broken on your system. WhizFolders needs a proper OLE server to show pictures. So does Wordpad. So you will see exactly the same problem in Wordpad. Please confirm that first.

Normally, the ole server that shows bmp pictures is Microsoft Paint. On some systems, it is Microsoft Photo Editor. There may be other graphics programs too that can act as ole servers. But the problem happens if an uninstall (or install) program of some graphic software breaks the registry links.

Here are some things you can try.

1. Click on Start–Run and type: regsvr32 ole32.dll. See if this fixes the problem.
2. If that doesn’t fix it, you need to tweak the registry using REGEDIT utility. If you are not comfortable doing that, please follow on to step 3. Here are the steps to perform with RegEdit:

   (A) Click on Start–Run and type RegEdit to start it.

   (B) Using Regedit, go to the key “HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.bmp”. Select .bmp key on the left as shown in the picture.

   (C) On the right, see the value of Default. The value that you have there might give some idea of the program that caused the problem.

   (D) Caution: Before changing that value, export this registry key to some place (File menu) so that you can restore the current value later if needed. You must save as .REG file in export so that you can restore it. Do not save as .TXT file.

   (E) Now in the right pane, right-click on Modify to change the value of Default to: Paint.Picture

   (F) Important: If this method fixes the problem, please DO NOT ask the program that had occupied this value earlier to associate itself with the .bmp files. Otherwise, you will get the same problem again.

3. In most of the cases, one of the above steps should fix it. If it doesn’t, try reinstalling Microsoft Photo Editor (if you have it) or Microsoft Paint (see steps later). But note that if you are using some other program to edit the graphic files then you may have to reinstall that other program. In that case, try these reinstalls only if you are confident that you will be able to reinstall that other graphics program or its file associations if things go wrong with it.

   For reinstalling Microsoft Paint, go to Add Remove programs in Control Panel and then in Windows Components–Accessories and Tools–Details–Accessories–Details, do a uncheck on Paint and remove it. Then do it once more and put ON that option to reinstall it. Note that you may need your XP CD for this. On Vista, this procedure won’t work, and I don’t know the answer on how to reinstall Microsoft Paint. May be you can get it back from some disk image you saved by a tool like Acronis True Image.

If the problem still exists, it is a case we haven’t encountered. In that case, please contact us. It would help if you send us the .REG file exported from the .BMP key that we mention above.

Question:The default paragraph spacing is 0.0 before and after. It would be nice to be able to set your own default paragraph attributes, rather than having to open the full editor and change the attributes of a paragraph through the format menu each time you create topics.

You can set this up by following this procedure:

1. Make sure that the option “Pick and Apply Format Buttons also copy Paragraph settings” is ON on the Editor page of General Options.
2. Now, use the Pick Format button in the editor to pick up the format from the desired paragraph.
3. Click on File Options for the document and go to the New Topics page.
4. Click on the Copy Last Picked Format button.

This will set the desired settings for the new topics so that you won’t have to change them each time.

Just look at the “File Options” of a document. You will see a New Topics page where you can set up the font to use for any new topics that you create. But, the default font for the existing topics can’t be changed as they already contain the rich text encoding.

However, in the new version, we have given a Tools menu operation to change the default font of the existing topics.

This is a problem with Microsoft RichEdit control that WhizFolders uses. The latest version solves this problem to some extent by using a newer RichEdit control from Microsoft. The option to select or deselect the newer RichEdit is on the Editor page of General Options in the new version.

In version 5.6 of WhizFolders, if you want to preserve the look of the tables, it is best to insert a Microsoft Word OLE object in the editor from the Insert–Object menu and then make a table in that using Microsoft Word. The only downside is that the text inside the table will not be available for searching in WhizFolders.