These hints deal with some of the tricky points of using the Netscape HTML editor.Before reading them, you may want to look at the step-by-step directions given in the page titled Creating a Home Page Using the Netscape editor.
Netscape is designed to display files that live on remote computers. If you start the editor on a remote file, netscape will make a local copy for you to edit. Unfortunately, if you go to your home page by following a link, Netscape will treat it like a remote file: It makes a copy, and offers to make certain changes to the links in it. This is generally not what you want, so I recommend that if Netscape tells you it needs to make a "local" copy of one of your files, you just hit cancel, exit Netscape, and start it again giving the file name on the command line, as above.
Fonts and underlines have a tendency to keep going when you don't mean them to. Even worse, the Undo command does not work right, i.e., it does not undo everything. You'll need to select the extra text and clear it by hand. The "clear all styles" button (looks like a shaded A with rays around it) can be very handy.
You'll get similar problems trying to make indented lists. Other things can't be done at all. This is all very frustrating, but be patient, it's still a lot more conventient that typing HTML codes by hand! Your alternatives are to use a recent version of Word and save your document in HTML format, or to learn HTML and do it by hand using emacs.
You will notice that things in the editor don't generally look exactly as in the browser. Keep a browser window open at the same time so you can check what your file really looks like. (You'll need to Save your changes in the editor, then Reload in the browser to see them).
In the browser, highlight the text you want and select Copy from the Edit menu (or press Alt-C). You can then paste the text in the editor using the Paste button on the toolbar, or with the key combination Alt-V. Unfortunately, you can't paste text selected from an emacs or xterm window, only from Netscape.
In an Editor window, you can Copy text containing links and then Paste it, link and all.
Highlight the text you want to make into a link, then click on the button with the chain-link icon. To make a target (a destination you can jump to within the document), click on the button with the bull's eye.
You can set the title and the background of your document from the Document... command in the Properties menu.
The best way to learn how to do more things with HTML is to look at how they are done in other people's pages. To do this you'll need to read the raw HTML files and understand what you are looking at.
You should realize that anything your browser can display, you can save locally and modify or use as-is. You can also embed images in your documents without making a local copy, by providing the URL for their remote location. (Needless to say you are responsible for respecting copyright restrictions on material so marked, etc).
To look at the source of a document, from either the browser or the editor, just select View Document Source in the View menu. (You can make a local copy with the Save as... command in the File menu).
To make a local copy of an image, put your mouse over the image and hold down (don't just click) the rightmost mouse button. You'll get a nice menu with all sorts of useful things. You can do the same over a link, with similar results. On the Mac, hold down the command (flower) key and then hold down the mouse button to get the menu.
alexis@ling.upenn.edu