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Text objects

Text objects come in two flavors: simple text boxes, and minipages.

  The position you have to click to start creating a text object is the lower left corner of the piece of text. You are then placed in text entry mode. Table 1 shows the available keys. Ipe tries to follow the standard key settings of the Emacs editor. (We also follow the Emacs convention to represent Control-A by C-a, and Alt+a by M-a).

Table 1 : Control keys while entering text

ESC abort text RET and M-e end text C-a begin of line C-e end of line C-b backward one char M-b backward one word C-f forward one char M-f forward one word C-d delete char M-d delete word Backspace rubout previous char M-Backspace rubout previous word C-k kill rest of line C-t transpose two characters C-w cut region to X cut buffer (see below) M-w copy region to X cut buffer (see below) C-y paste X cut buffer at cursor position C-@ and C-space set mark at cursor position C-x exchange point and mark C-n next line C-p previous line C-j line feed M-< beginning of text M-> end of text C-_ undo last change
  The region used by C-w and M-w is the area between the cursor and the mark, which is set by C-space. You can also use the left and right mouse buttons to set the cursor and the mark, and the middle mouse button to paste. (The right mouse button not only sets the mark but also copies the region to the X cut buffer, so clicking with the three mouse buttons is sufficient to copy text within a text object). You can also copy and paste text to and from other windows.

  When you finish a text object, the system will compute and display a bounding box. When Latex Boxes in the configuration panel is set to on, Ipe will invoke LaTeX to compute the bounding box. Note that for this to work well, you must set the LaTeX preamble to something reasonable. Using LaTeX bounding boxes has the disadvantage that a LaTeX job has to be run in the background all the time. Therefore, it is possible to turn LaTeX boxes off. In that case, a bounding box based on the screen representation is computed.

The interface with the background LaTeX process is designed such that most errors in the text object can be recognized. However, sometimes this will not be sufficient (as, for instance, when you put the text \enddocument in a text object). In that case you get an error message, the LaTeX process is killed, and the Latex Boxes button is set to off. You have to set it back to on manually after fixing the problem, if you want to remain using LaTeX bounding boxes.

  A minipage is different from a simple text object in that its width is part of its definition. When you create a minipage object, you first have to drag out a rectangle for the minipage (but only the width of this rectangle is actually used). When a minipage is printed, it will be processed by LaTeX in paragraph mode (Actually, as you might have a guessed, a minipage object is enclosed in a pair of \begin{minipage} and \end{minipage} when it is send to LaTeX). LaTeX tries to fill the given bounding box as nicely as possible. It is possible to include center environments, lemmas, and much more in minipages. This object type is mainly used for producing slides or other presentations with lots of nicely formatted text.

You can change the bounding box of a minipage using the scale and stretch functions. In minipage creation mode, the RET key has the same effect as C-j. To end creation mode, you have to use M-e. The M-g key can be used to reformat the contents of a minipage when you have changed its bounding box. But be aware that what you will get on the paper has nothing to do at all with the screen representation, and is completely left to LaTeX. Use the preview functions to make sure that what you get is what you want.

  While you can scale or stretch the bounding box of a minipage, the text itself cannot be scaled or rotated. When you apply rotate, scale, or stretch to a simple text object, its position will move with the other objects, but it will stay horizontal and at the same size. To change the size of a text object, you have to select a different font size in the Font field. (This is a feature and has deliberately been chosen to work this way.)

  The only four fonts available within Ipe are Roman, Italic, Bold, and Math. The first three of them are translated to LaTeX commands \rm, \it, or \bf at the beginning of the text. A text object set in Math font is enclosed by a pair of dollar signs, and thus processed by LaTeX in math mode. You can produce any other font or size using LaTeX commands embedded in your text. Note that the size of a text object set in the Font field is passed to LaTeX in a \IPEcolfs command. See "Ipe and Latex" for details on the meaning of \IPEcolfs. By changing that command, you can customize the actual sizes printed.

  Existing text can be edited. You select the text you want to modify, and then press M-e. You are then back in a mode familiar from the creation of text objects. Type M-e to leave it again.


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