International
Tables for Crystallography Volume G Definition and exchange of crystallographic data Edited by S. R. Hall and B. McMahon © International Union of Crystallography 2006 |
International Tables for Crystallography (2006). Vol. G. ch. 5.3, p. 502
Section 5.3.3.1.4. The main edit pane
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The main edit pane is a text-editing area where the user may directly modify the content of a CIF. Colours and font styles are used to indicate different syntactic elements. The details of the colours and styles may be modified to suit the user.
For the novice user, this is perhaps the most immediately helpful feature offered by this program. When a trailing semicolon is inadvertently lost from an extended text field, typical sequential parsers may interpret succeeding tokens as part of the quoted text and produce misleading error reports. Within the enCIFer edit window, all such text is marked up in a specific colour (green by default) so that the fault is much more obvious to the human eye and its source much easier to locate.
Two other typographic cues are used to help the user to trace errors, or to ensure that certain text has been input correctly. Subscripts and superscripts are represented in a smaller typeface (and in a different colour) so that missing delimiter characters are again obvious to the eye. Secondly, some special characters in the conventional CIF encoding (such as Greek letters) are displayed in an appropriate symbol font when the file is first loaded, so that for example the input string \a is rendered as \α. Note that the backslash character is retained, and that the symbol character is not generated as new text is input or edited. This scheme therefore has some potential for confusion, but is nevertheless helpful in checking that less obvious special codes have been entered correctly.
The user is free to enter arbitrary text in this pane, possibly breaking CIF syntax rules in the process. Only when the revalidation process is manually invoked will the file be rescanned and any errors reported.