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IDF editing tips

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EscapeE Professional editions only

The code shown in the IDF coding window can be edited from your keyboard; if you're not a programmer, here are some tips...

To look for a particular string of characters in the code, click Search on the Menu-bar. This displays the 'Find' dialog – see To find text.

Sweep-out the text to be changed and type in the new.
Old text	<TEXT>5 Regius Court, Penn, High Wycombe</TEXT>
New text	<TEXT>Aston Court Kingsmead Business Park Frederick Place High Wycombe</TEXT>

Sweep-out the text-string specifying the filename and/or path and type in the new filename and/or path.
Old file	<FILE FILENAME="c:\Reports\2015\Winter.pcl" />
New file	<FILE FILENAME="c:\Reports\2016\Spring.pcl" />

An IDF document is built from a series of individual "parts" placed on its page(s). These parts (known as "elements") need to be tagged according to their purpose – to add a piece of text or a logo from a file etc.. Elements are easily recognized by their start and end tags.
See IDF elements for descriptions of what each element can do.

"Tags" signal the opening and closing of an element.

For example, the tag <TEXT> opens a TEXT element and the tag </TEXT> closes it. The text that is actually put on the page is entered between the tags.

Some elements are composed of a single self-contained tag. See, for example, the FILE element above: the tag starts with < and ends with />.

"Attributes" can be added to the 'start' tags of elements to override the default set up for that element. For example, you could specify that the color of the text is to be red by adding COLOR="RED" to the start tag of a <TEXT> element.
Default color	<TEXT>5 Regius Court, Penn, High Wycombe</TEXT>
Specific color	<TEXT COLOR="RED">5 Regius Court, Penn, High Wycombe</TEXT>
See IDF attributes for a list of available attributes and click on an attribute name for details on the values (e.g. what pen color) which each attribute may take.

Clicking Copy & Add to IDF adds a clip region as attributes to an element (see Creating an IDF document).

In the example below, a clip region 9.01 inches wide and 2.34 inches high is copied from page 12 of the 'Tables.pdf' file. The position of the top-left corner of the clip region in the original file is 3.45 inches from the left and 6.78 inches down from the top-left corner of the page. It is placed 0.5 inch below the current coordinates X, Y in the IDF container element.

To change the location of the clip region to a fixed position instead, enter absolute values for the 'X' and 'Y' attributes:

Relative position

Absolute position

PAGE elements are used to assemble the clip(s) into separate pages of the IDF document. The <PAGE> tag opens a new page, and the </PAGE> tag closes it.

1.	To split an existing page into two pages, move the cursor to the end of the last element required to be in the current page.

2.	Press Enter then key-in </PAGE> to close the current page.

3.	Press Enter again then key-in <PAGE> tag to open a new page.

In this example, a page-break is inserted between the second and third clips.

One PAGE element containing three CLIPs

New PAGE element created to contain third CLIP

To join two adjacent pages, just delete the <PAGE> and </PAGE> lines which formed the page-break.

1.	Click New IDF file on the 'File' menu to open a new IDF page into the Console notebook.

2.	Copy and paste the code from one of the Sample IDF scripts over the existing default text (it's OK to lose the formatting, only the plain text need be extracted).

3.	Click Show in EscapeE to check what it does then try editing its code.

EscapeE can spot some types of coding errors and warn you of the problem when the IDF document is opened, e.g.

missing > after end tag at line 4

Move the cursor onto the code in the examples above to show hints; click to jump to IDF syntax.

Links

Editing an IDF document