Xopus 3.1 Demo

Word Documents

This is a Word document describing a recipe for Christmas Ham. In Word you type up the information and then Word applies a style to it, following the template of the document. For example the template will make a paragraph have the Arial font with a size of twelve points. You can however, if you like, edit the style of some words to look like something else by selecting it and changing the font and size. Word then usually tries to use your style as well, and you get a mix of styles in your document, which no longer follow the template. In the end you have a document that doesn't completely look and feel according to the style of the template. You would however, like to seperate the content from the style.

Rich Text Paste

 Xopus 3.1 now supports rich-text paste. To show what that can mean for you we will take a look at pasting some rich-text into some different environments. In this HTML document we have a TEXTAREA (plain text editing) and a DIV with contentEditable (HTML editing), a feature of Internet Explorer which allows What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editing. In both these fields I can paste anything.

Please open the Word document and the HTML document and place them next to each other. You can save the word document to your desktop and open it, and open the HTML document here. Now if you copy a part from the word document and paste it into either field of the HTML document you can see what happens.

From TEXTAREA to Plain Text

Pasting into the TEXTAREA results merely in a text paste. All the formatting is gone. If you select a header and a paragraph, or a list, all you get in return is just text and line-breaks.

Plain Text Field

From contentEditable DIV to HTML

Pasting into the contentEditable DIV gives you exactly the same markup as the word document. It is converted to HTML. All the markup or styling information is pasted with the text. This is perhaps not what you want, if you want to use this information on your website. Your website has its own style, and you don't want information in the database to retain its own style on your website. You just want to style it in accordance to the style of your website.

HTML field

Paste the first paragraph from the document and notice how the bold and italic text retain their markup. Everything is copied here, even the 'mistakes' in the list of the document, where different font-types were used. Pasting from the TEXTAREA to this field shows that only text is pasted; the style that is set by the page for this field is then applied.

Xopus 3.1 Rich Text Paste

Now open the Xopus Demo and the word document and try the same things. Try pasting a list into Xopus, or try to paste a paragraph. What you will see is that Xopus copies the information, and applies the style of the current template/website. The information is stored separately from the style. The style from the document is thrown away, because that wasn't what we wanted.

You can now create your own style templates, then get some information from a database and display it. With Xopus you can also add or edit that information in the database, while looking at the style that you had created. You can also copy and paste information from wherever you like. Xopus will separate it and maintain your style, and what's more Xopus will even guard the format of your information.

Style, Information and Information Schema

In the word document we can add a new Title at any time, but somehow having two main titles in a document sort of defeats the purpose. Xopus knows how many main titles, sub headers, etc. are allowed and so will also assist the user in editing the document by never allowing the creation of a format (or Schema) of information that isn't correct. Even when pasting a title, paragraph and list all at once, Xopus will see where you are pasting and see how it fits.