The K Desktop Environment

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3. Onscreen Fundamentals

KEdit is very simply to use. I am sure that if you have ever used a text edit you will have no problems with KEdit.

3.1 Drag and Drop

KEdit makes use of the KDE Drag and Drop protocol. This means that you can darg and drop files form the Desktop or kfm or some remote ftp site that you have open in one of kfm's windows on to KEdit.

3.2 Editing files on the internet

You can open and save files transparently on the internet. Try the the following at the command-line prompt to see an example of this.

% kedit ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/Welcome.msg

3.3 Printing

KEdit supports printing. You can either print the document your are editing or the selection you made directly to your default printer. Optionally you can specify the printing command of your choice. There exist a number of printing utilities in the Unix world which are excellent. It would make little sense to try reimplement their efforts. Explicitely let me mention to you the following two printing utilites.

GNU enscript.

Markku Rossi has written a powerful reincarnation of Adobe's enscript ascii to postscript utility. My favorite usage is enscript -2rG text.txt, but GNU enscript goes far beyond that. Make sure you have the latest version from http://www.hut.fi/~mtr/genscript/, or any GNU mirror.

a2ps

Akim Demaille and Miguel Santana have written a powerful ascii to Postscript conversion utility which will format your output depending on the documentype. Whether you want to print out C++ sources or a email message, the default styles are very nice. Get it from: http://www-inf.enst.fr/~demaille/a2ps.html

The above two utilities are an absolute must. If you don't have them, get them and become familiar with their usage. Learning how to use them is no longer a problem due to our great html/texinfo/man viewer kdehelp. These utilities are your friends when it comes to printing in the UNIX world. Due to their power and many options once you know how to use them properly, you will always miss them should they ever not be available to you, even under Windows95.

Make sure your system is set up for printing PostScript documents. If you don't have a native PostScript printer ( who does?) get yourself ghostscript/ghostview version 4.03 or higher from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/%7Eghost/. Note, that there are now commercial grade ps fonts available that come with the ghostview/ghostscript package. These fonts are a must for any quality printing of Postscript documents on a non-postscript printer. If you were dissapointed by the results you got from ghostscript on your printer so far - get the new fonts, this will give you the best possible results.

3.4 Key Bindings

KEdit honors the following key bindings.

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