WORKING WITH THE EDITOR
MG's Editor has a couple of functions clearly determined. One of those is the modification of the final metapost file obtained with MG by hand, and saving it with the name choosen.
The other "function" of the editor correspond to the capability of introducing direct MP code in any draw, what is useful not only to write complicated macros outside the scope of Metagraf, but also to introduce a part of a picture already done in the past. It is enough to copy and paste (both instructions work o.k., and also Ctrl C and Ctrl V) the file to the editor and then put it in the drawing with the use of the "MP" button. The advantage of this way of doing is the fact that this part of the image does interact as a single quick object and so, it does not affect the speed of MG screen.
To launch the editor's panel, the button at right with the tittle "EDIT" must be clicked. Immediatly, the panel editor will appear with a quite reduced size. This size can be modified at will, being the default small to permit to let it in some part of METAGRAF's screen without disturbing. The editor has only three options to make it as simple as possible. The first one is CLEAR and serves to let the screen blank after something has been written in the quickest way. The other two, OPEN and SAVE correspond to the usual ones. Any text file can be opened in the editor, modified and saved with the same or different name. Particularly this is useful when, at the end of a drawing it is desirable to change a small detail, and easy to do it by hand. Care must be taken if we modify in some way a file with the editor, then continue working in the usual way and finally the file is saved. This last file will not have the modifications done already. For that reason it is convenient to wait until the end or to paste the whole modified figure as a metapost file in the screen, but this need a good knowledge of METAGRAF.
For the reasons just mentioned, it is very convenient to delete all files in "files" directory begining with "graf_..." (this is done automatically from version 1.1.1) when a session is finished. The file with the bigger number after "graf_.." is the last saved file.
Related with the pure application of texts, in next chapters we will come back to the editor or the TextField but then it will be about its use as a pure "base" for texts.