Blog: WhizFolders, Articles and tips

WhizFolders encourages outlining in the topic list because it is easier to change or rearrange your outline by simple drag and drop and move operations.

But if you want to prepare an outline in the editor by nesting the bulleted and numeric lists, you can try that too. Note that WhizFolders uses Microsoft RichEdit and there is no inherent nested list feature there. Try making nested bulleted and numeric lists in Wordpad and you will see what I mean. But in WhizFolders, we have improved the use of RichEdit to allow the nested lists.

For this to work properly, the cursor must already be in a list item. Then you need to click the right-indent button to start a nested list. When you do that, the inner list becomes a numeric list and you can change its type on the List Type pull down on the Tool bar.

You will see that as you outdent and indent, or even insert blank lines, WhizFolders is able to continue the numbering. We have worked hard to create this feature. At times, it might fail if it encounters complicated formatting. If it doesn’t properly continue the numbering for a case, there is a “change starting number” button to fix that. To use that button, put the cursor on an item and click on the above button on the toolbar. You will find the “Change number” button next to the List Type button. Note that you need to enter a number that you want the numeric list item to use. If the numeric list is of the type A., B., C., you still need to enter a number, 1 for A, 2 for B and so on.

If this sounds complicated, please wait for a demo that I am preparing to be released next week.

How can I change the “default font” in all of the actual text stored in WF - not just the topic - but the whole document?

Select all those topics and click on the menu “Tools–Change Font in Selected Topics.” Note that this will only change the “default font.” That means, the text that you entered originally without changing its font is in default font and only that would change. That is the way it works in Microsoft RichEdit that WhzFolders uses.

If you also want the future topics to get this default font, you can set that up in “Tools–File Options–New Topics.”

Please also see the demo on fonts in the demos section of whizfolders.com.

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.

Update: The new version 6.3 soon to be released has features to detect and fix this problem that occurs due to some graphics other program in your registry.

WHY THIS PROBLEM OCCURS?

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, for example, PaintShop Pro 7 works well too. 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. You need to tweak the registry using REGEDIT utility. If you are not comfortable doing that, please follow on to step 2. Here are the steps to perform with RegEdit:

   (A) Click on Start–Run and type RegEdit to start it. (On Vista, the Start menu won’t have Run command. You can either customize it to add the Run command or type Run in the bottom search box and then select “Run” in the list above when it appears.)

   (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.

2. 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.

3. If none of the above fixes work, here is another thing to try. Click on Start–Run and type: regsvr32 ole32.dll. See if this fixes the problem.

If the problem still exists, it seems to be 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.

Addendum, here are some other points to understand regarding pictures, their display in Wordpad and WhizFolders and the programs that edit them:

How does the registry get disturbed as explained above? I will give you an example. Suppose you install a program GraphicXYZ on your computer and it asks you, do you always want to open this program to open the .BMP files? If you say yes, that program changes the registry so that .BMP files always open in that program. But if that program can not act as an OLE server, it breaks the picture display feature in Wordpad and WhizFolders.

So what is the solution? Don’t ask a program to set it up as opener but instead, use the right-click “Open With” menu in Windows Explorer to set up a program as an opener for the .bmp file type.

What program, other than Microsoft Paint, seems to work well both as an opener and also as an OLE server?

The first one is Microsoft Photo Editor, according to Microsoft documentation. Another one that I found that works well is PaintShop Pro version 7. I have not tested other versions. To use these programs as ole servers, simply ask them to set them up as openers for .bmp files and it should work. If you find some other program that works well, please let us know.

What if I want to edit the picture inserted in WhizFolders? Note that WhizFolders reduces the quality of a picture when inserting to reduce its byte-size to a value that it can manage. So if quality is important to you, it is always better to preserve your picture file outside if you plan on editing it. Then resinsert it in WhizFolders after editing as necessary.

Otherwise, if you double-click on the picture in the editor of WhizFolders, it opens for editing in Microsoft Paint or whatever is set up as the ole server in the registry. If you don’t want to use that program for editing pictures, you need to use copy and paste to edit the picture in your favorite graphics program and paste it back in your WhizFolder document to replace the original picture.

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.