Chapter 2. Tutorial

Table of Contents
1. Changing the title and icon
2. Changing the About dialog box
3. Adding a word count tool
4. Adding a preferences sheet for the word count tool
5. Adding a document type specific tool bar
6. Adding a Characters menu

What follows is a description of the customization we want to do:

  1. Change the (desktop) title and icon of XMLmind XML Editor.

  2. Change the dialog box displayed by HelpAbout.

  3. Add to the status bar a small tool which allows to count the words of a document.

  4. Extend the dialog box displayed by OptionsPreferences by adding a custom ``preferences sheet''. This preferences sheet is needed to parametrize the above word count tool.

  5. Move iconic buttons which are specific to a given document type (i.e. DocBook buttons, XHTML buttons, etc) from their normal place, the standard tool bar, to a tool bar of their own. This new tool bar will be found just below the standard tool bar.

  6. Add a custom Characters menu after standard Edit menu. This Characters menu will allow to quickly insert special characters (Greek letters, arrows) in the document being edited.

To do this, we need not only to change the specification of the GUI of XXE, but also to develop custom parts in the Java™ language. These custom parts are:

All this is explained in Chapter 14, Application parts and the custom parts are found in XXE_install_dir/doc/gui/tutorial/custom_parts.jar with the other files of this tutorial. This being said, we can now focus on the specification of the user interface of XMLmind XML Editor.