Features

Page Previewing

Although not a WYSIWYG editor SCREEM provides a view by which you can see what your page(s) may look like in a browser. Of course the exact look depends on which browser is in use. If the internal preview isn't sufficient then up to four external browsers are supported, three customisable ones, and the default GNOME http handler.

Syntax Highlighting

As you would expect there is support in the editor for syntax highlighting, to allow easy identification, at a glance, of what HTML is present. This is of course customisable via the application preferences to whatever colours you like, or even more so by editing the XML syntax files to highlight the patterns you want.

DTD/Doctype Parsing

This is one of the more powerful features of SCREEM, the ability to identify which doctype a page is using, and process the DTD file. This is then used in other features to provide you with the valid tags and attributes for that style of document. As such SCREEM support WML, Docbook or any other SGML / XML, as well as the expected HTML

Inline Tagging

Inline Tagging is the act of displaying a popup menu showing the valid attributes while typing in a tag. For instance typeing <body would result in a popup menu appearing when space was pressed to enter an attribute. You can of course just keep typing and ignore the menu, or if you don't like it, turn the feature off.

Intelliclose

Ever forgotten just which tag you need to close next? Well this is where intelliclose comes in handy, you just type the </ and SCREEM will fill in the correct tag name.

Helper Applications

The authors of SCREEM understand that it will not provide every feature you want, or that you may like to use other applications to help you create HTML, as such helper applications are supported. These are configurable from the application preferences and let you specify an application which, when executed from SCREEM will be fed the current page via STDIN, and then SCREEM will expect a processed version of the page from the helper application's STDOUT. A good example of this is the use of HTMLTidy to check your markup and automatically indent your page to a particular style.

Document Structure Display

In larger documents, or documents with a lot of elements it can become more difficult to find the source you want to edit, this is where the document structure view comes in, it can be accessed either as a side bar which allows you to select element blocks and see if you have closed elements correctly etc.

CVS Support

CVS is supported from within SCREEM so you can use version control to aid in development between multiple developers, and to keep track of changes made over time. The support does rely on CVS being installed on your system.

Broken Link Checking

A "link view" is provided which shows all the links in the current page, and links in those pages, to a user definable depth. The link view also shows if a link is accessible or not, or if the file needs uploading if the upload wizard is being utilised for the site being worked on.

Publishing

SCREEM incorporates Sitecopy to facilitate updating of a remote site based on which files have changed locally, this saves you having to remember just exactly which files have changed when. It also means support for all the transport methods supported by Sitecopy, such as WebDAV, and FTP.

Search / Replace

As can be expected search/replace support is provided in the editor, however sometimes you may want to search across your entire site or replace some text in multiple pages. SCREEM therefore provides support for site wide search/replace.

Task management

When working on a site it can be handy to provide a list of tasks that need to be completed along with their priority. To facilitate this a site wide todo list can be created, and tasks marked off as completed as and when you do them.

Spell Checker

Advanced spell checking is also supported, this means that you can spell check your pages without having to put up with the spell checker wanting to correct markup.