When you first enter the Edit Dictionary dialog, there may be a short delay while the contents of
the dictionary are loaded into memory.
When the dictionary has loaded, a portion of the words and clues will be displayed in a list box in the top portion of the
dialog.
The current word and clue are highlighted in this list box, and they also appear in the Edit Word and Edit Clue
edit fields.
Navigating the Dictionary
The simplest method of moving around the dictionary is to use the Scroll bar associated with the Words and Clues list box.
When the word you are interested in appears, you can select it by pointing and clicking with the mouse.
Having selected a word, you can move to nearby words using the Up and Down arrow keys, or you can move
further afield using the Page Up and Page Down keys (on an iMac, use fn-UpArrow and fn-DnArrow). Naturally,
the Home and End keys will move you to the beginning or to the end of the dictionary (on an iMac, use fn-LeftArrow
and fn-RightArrow).
If you want to jump to a very precise location in the dictionary, you can begin typing into the Edit Word field.
With each letter that you type, the words and clues in the list boxes will change, bringing you ever closer to the word that
you require. When it appears, you can select it by means of a mouse click.
If the word happens to be already in the dictionary, its clue will be displayed, and you will have the opportunity of
editing that clue.
If the word is not in the dictionary, the Edit Clue field will be empty, and you can immediately begin typing in
your clue.
Regardless of how you select a word, pressing the Tab key twice will move you to the Clue field which you can begin editing.
Adding and Deleting words
After typing a new Word into the Edit Word field, pressing the Enter key will move the cursor to the Edit
Clue field where you can type in your Clue. When the clue is entered, pressing the Enter key again will save the
new Word and Clue into their correct alphabetical position in the Words and Clues list box, and the cursor will be moved
back to the Edit Word field so that the cycle can begin again. As with any editing function, it is recommended that
you save your work at regular intervals.
Selecting the Edit / Delete this Word menu option will remove the current word and its clue from the edit screen. It
will be deleted from the dictionary the next time you do a Save operation.
The number of characters which may be typed into each clue is virtually
unlimited. Thus, you can use very long clues in your puzzles, or if you prefer, you can enter a number of clues for each
word. The individual sub-clues must be separated by a single * character.
Individual portions of a clue may be highlighted as either Bold or Italic. This
is done by placing tags into the clue in a way which will be quite familiar to people who maintain their own web page using
HTML. Inclusion of the tag <b> at any point in the clue will result in the text being rendered in
Bold type face until such time as a </b> tag is encountered. Similarly, <i> will turn on
Italic type face, and </i> will turn it off.
All of these operations are supported during Dictionary Editing, and are accessible from the Edit menu. You can also
use the normal Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V keyboard commands.
If you fail to enter a clue for a word, that word will still be saved into the dictionary, and become a Clueless Word.
If you do this by mistake, it is a simple matter to immediately delete the unwanted word.
Any character of the Unicode specification may be used in a Magnum Opus dictionary. This is done by attaching an Auxiliary
Keyboard to the Dictionary Edit screen. Simply clicking a character within such a keyboard will insert that character
at the current insertion point.
Complete control of the auxiliary keyboard is possible from within the dictionary edit screen by means of the following controls:-
The Auxiliary Keyboard can be added or removed at any time by means of the Attach Auxiliary Keyboard and Detach Auxiliary
Keyboard menu options available from the Task menu.
The actual keyboard you use can be controlled using the Select Keyboard spinner control immediately above the top right corner of
the auxiliary keyboard. You can step through the keyboards one at a time using the up and down arrows of the spinner control or if you know the
number of the keyboard you want, you can click into the edit field, type it in directly, and then press Enter. It is important to note that
either of these operations will move the focus away from the dictionary field which you were editing, so before you continue editing, it will
be necessary to resume that focus by mouse clicking back into the appropriate dictionary field.
Much more information on this subject can be found here.
Saving the changes
To avoid the frustration of losing your work in a power failure, you should perform a save operation at regular intervals.
Mostly you will use the File / Save and Resume option which allows you to continue editing after the save.
If you are done with editing, you can use the File / Save and Quit option which results in the Edit Dictionary
dialog being closed after the save is completed.
If you want to finish editing without saving your changes, then you should use the File / Quit Editing option.
Note that a warning will be given in this case if changes have been made.
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