Quick Start Instructions

Multiple Selections

You can highlight multiple bits of text on a web page by holding down the Control key while you click or drag. Try it now: hold down Control and select all the underlined words in this sentence.  You can unselect something by holding down Control and clicking on it to toggle its selection off.
Multiple selections allow you to edit many places at once using familiar editing operations (typing, deleting, Cut/Copy/Paste).  LAPIS can edit both text files and web pages, although web page editing is extremely limited. (You can edit the text of a web page, but you can't change its formatting without viewing it as Plain Text and editing the HTML tags directly.)

Simultaneous Editing

You can make multiple selections faster by giving examples.  Here's the idea: you make one selection, and LAPIS guesses what else you want to select based on your example.  Selection by example works best when you tell LAPIS in advance what to focus its attention on.  Try it now on this list of names and phone numbers:

               (412) 268-6571    Joe
               (212) 421-4843    Phyllis
               (412) 268-7458    Wilhelm
               (610) 421-7359    Franco
               (412) 268-7083    Julius
               (617) 268-2793    Renee
               (510) 682-1168    Eugenia

1. Select the list of names and phone numbers as one selection. This will be the focus of attention.
2. From the Selection menu, choose Simultaneous Editing.  The phone numbers should turn yellow.
3. Place a text editing cursor at the beginning of a phone number.  Notice that corresponding cursors appear in all the other phone numbers.
4. Use selection, typing and deleting to reformat all the phone numbers as shown below.

5.  +1.412.268.6571  Joe     +1.212.421.4843  Phyllis

6. Use Cut and Paste to move each person's name to the beginning, e.g.:

    Joe +1.412.268.6571       Phyllis +1.212.421.4843

7. From the Selection menu, choose Manual to return to manual selection mode.

Pattern Matching

A pattern is another way to make multiple selections.  When you type a pattern into the Pattern pane, all matches to the pattern become selected.  The Named Patterns pane displays a library of predefined patterns and parsers that you can use.  Try some of these patterns now by typing or copying them into the Pattern pane:

• "the"
• link
• last bullet in list
• sentence starting paragraph
• case-sensitive /[A-Z][a-z]+/

To learn more about the pattern language, read the Pattern Matching tutorial.

Commands

You can run Tcl commands and external programs from the Command box, and write scripts with the Script Editor.  Read the Commands tutorial to find out more.

Feedback

You can send us feedback --- comments, questions, bug reports, suggestions --- at any time by clicking on the big Feedback button in the lower right corner of the LAPIS window. Please send feedback especially when you experience a critical usability incident, e.g., when you can't figure out how to perform some task in LAPIS, when LAPIS does something unexpected, perplexing, or stupid, or when LAPIS seems to be wasting your time or making you frustrated.  The more information you can give us about the problem, the better.