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ASCII Text Editor

The PeakLab ASCII Editor is a NotePad-like editor available in many of the program's menus. The ASCII Editor option in the Edit menu within the program's main window is used primarily for editing the X-Y data table since it offers an update of the principal XY data with the numeric contents when closing the editor.

Most of PeakLab's principal text windows offer an ASCII Editor option which will place the contents of the window into the editor. If you wish to edit a non data table text file from the main menu, you may select the Display ASCII File... option in the main File menu, select the file desired, and then select the ASCII Editor option from the list window's Edit menu.

Considerations

The ASCII Editor is available throughout the program.

Columnar formatting, if present, can be preserved in the editor using a fixed width font, such as Courier. Special characters such as subscripts, superscripts, and symbols may not be preserved.

File Menu

The standard items to create a New file, to Open an existing file, to Save the current file, to Save As a different file, and to Exit are here.

The contents of the editor may be saved as an ASCII text file.

The Printer Setup item is used to select and optionally configure a printer for use by PeakLab. Note that the orientation option in the printer driver's own configuration dialog will be overridden by the orientation set in the Print Text dialog.

The Print item opens the Print Text dialog, allowing a header to be specified, the date and page number to be included, the orientation to be chosen, and the margins to be set. When printing from the editor, it is not possible to center the longest line nor to print only the visible portion of the editor.

Edit Menu

The standard items to Cut to, Copy to, and Paste from the clipboard are here as well as a single step Undo, the Delete of selected text, and a Select All for selecting all text. The Copy option will copy the selected or highlighted text to the clipboard in a text format.

Search Menu

The standard items consist of a Find, a Find and Replace, and a Next Item which will continue an existing Find or Find and Replace operation.

Style Menu

The editor always loads with a standard Courier font. The Font Select option will allow any other font to be used. For editing the content of PeakLab text windows, a fixed width font is recommended.

There are four formatting items in the Style menu. The Reverse Comma and Decimal item is usually for converting European format numeric entries to the decimal type required by PeakLab. This option converts all comma characters within the file to the period character, as in [123,45] being converted to [123.45]. If you manually enter data, you may do so with commas as decimal separators and then use the Reverse Comma and Decimal option to convert to it to the format required by PeakLab.

The Space Delimited option will strip all whitespace from the program except for a single space delimiter between the entries. The Comma Delimited option accomplishes the same task, except that the single delimiter will be the comma character. In the Tab Delimited option, the tab character serves as the delimiter.