NoteTab HTML and Text Editor - Using NoteTab FAQ

Yes, as long as you are not running Windows 7 or Vista. If NoteTab is correctly installed, you will find a command called Replace MS Notepad under the Help menu. When you choose that command, NoteTab will first rename Notepad by adding the extension .MS to the program file. Then, it will copy a special little program called NOTEPAD.STB to the Windows directory and rename it NOTEPAD.EXE. Whenever this program is executed, it launches NoteTab instead of Notepad. If you want to restore MS Notepad after this operation, just use the command Restore MS Notepad, which is also available under the Help menu.

Note that this feature is currently not available under Windows 7 and Vista. It may also not always work properly under Windows 2000, ME, and XP, due to the Windows File Protection (WFP) monitoring system, which checks for changes to system files. In this case, you should assign text files to NoteTab through the Associations screen in the Options dialog box.

Although NoteTab is not a native Unicode editor, you can open, edit, convert, and save such files reliably as long as all the text fits within a single ANSI code page supported by Windows. If the file contains characters from more than one code page, or if they are based on a code page not supported by your Windows system, then they will fail to convert to the ANSI format and NoteTab will open the file as Read-Only.

Note that you can turn off Read-Only mode through the Document menu. If you choose to edit such documents in NoteTab and save the changes, some characters may be lost in the process.

You can experiment with this capability in NoteTab 6 by using the Open Sample File Clip in the SampleCode library. It offers to open a selection of sample plain text and HTML files containing text based on a variety of character sets (Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, etc.)

Definition: An ANSI code page is a character encoding standard, which is used to map a specific set of characters to numerical code point values. A code page is used to correctly display and convert non-Unicode text.

No. You have probably set the Wrap to Column option as a default setting or for the current document. Using this feature in NoteTab Light and Std turns off regular word wrap behavior and inserts line breaks to force column wrap. Unchecking Wrap to Column at a later stage does not remove the inserted line breaks. Please consider upgrading your license to NoteTab Pro if you need column wrap that updates in real time like regular word wrap.

Unlike NoteTab Std, NoteTab Pro cannot use variable-width fonts. It therefore limits your choice of fonts to those that are fixed-width. This design is imposed by the input control used in NoteTab Pro. The benefits are better performance and a choice of commands/configuration options that are not available in NoteTab Std.

If you don’t like the fixed-width fonts available on your computer, try the beautiful DejaVu Mono font. You can download and use it for free.

Starting with NoteTab 5, hold down the Shift key while you click on the Print or Print Preview command.

The font used for printing text from NoteTab can be changed through the Page Setup dialog box, which is available through the File | Page Setup dialog box.

The file probably contains one or more null characters. By default, NoteTab treats the first null character it encounters as the end of the text. To change this behavior, you can set the Filter Binary Codes option which you will find on the Files tab in the Options dialog box. When this option is set, any null character NoteTab encounters when loading a file is converted to the substitute character (also defined in the Options dialog box). You will be able to load the full content of any file when this feature is enabled.

The most likely reason is that your document contains Unicode or UTF-8 text that NoteTab could not fully convert to the selected code page. When NoteTab opens Unicode files, it has to convert them to the ANSI character set (system default or code page specified in the File Open dialog), which supports much fewer characters. As a result, the conversion process may drop non-ANSI characters resulting in loss of information. When the Protect Unicode Files setting is checked (General tab in Options dialog box), Unicode files with characters that failed to convert are opened in Read-Only mode, which protects the document from changes. If you know that your Unicode or UTF-8 documents will not lose important information during the conversion process, uncheck this option so that such files are always editable. You can also make a document editable by unchecking the Read-Only option under the Document menu.

No such plans, sorry. However, NoteTab does run on a Mac and on Linux. See Can NoteTab run on Linux or Mac? for more details.

No. At the present time we do not have plans for this.

Although the mouse scroll wheel works well in NoteTab for the majority of users, a few have reported problems – sometimes after simply updating the mouse driver. We’ve never been able to reproduce any of the reported issues and therefore don’t know what is the source of the problem. A quick search on the Internet shows that there are many reports of malfunctioning scroll wheels with other Windows applications, so this is not an issue limited to NoteTab.

Installing the free third-party WizMouse utility usually solves scroll wheel issues.

First open the Utilities library by clicking on the button labeled Utilities at the bottom of the NoteTab window. Next, scroll down the list in the opened library until you reach the NoteTab Shortcuts section. Double-click on Add IE Default HTML Editor.

You must hold the Control key down and double-click on the link to open it in your browser. However, if you set the menu option Tools | Quick Open Links, you only need to double-click on the link without holding the Control key down.

There is an option in the Options dialog box on the Files tab that lets you choose the default open/ save directories.

This is not possible with NoteTab (or any plain text editor for that matter). This feature would require storing special control characters in the document. Since NoteTab is a plain text editor, it only saves documents as text without any control codes. Therefore all formatting information would be lost when you open the document again. If you want to format individual text elements, you will need a more sophisticated editor like a word processor.

Files produced by word processors are usually not saved as plain text files. They contain all sorts of control codes that only the word processor that created them (or compatible programs) can understand. Word processors use those special control characters to store text formatting information (bold, italic, line spacing, paragraph alignment, etc.).

The NoteTab editor only understands plain text files (that’s why it is so fast compared to a word processor) and will display the special control characters as funny symbols or rectangles on the screen. Some of the control characters may be interpreted by NoteTab as signaling the end of a file. This explains why such files are rarely fully loaded in the editor.

Unless you really know what you are doing, you should not edit or save such files with NoteTab. Doing this may render them unreadable to your word processor!

All programs using the standard Windows file dialog boxes do this. In fact, the default extension is added by Windows, not NoteTab. If the extension you are using is is associated to a program or is listed in the dialog’s file-type list, then the default extension is not added. You can add any extension to the list by opening the Options dialog box and then activating the File Filters tab. Another method to avoid appending the default extension is to enclose the file name in double quotes (for example: "MyFile.2012").

Microsoft added this behavior with the introduction of long file names. You can now have file names like the following:
MyFile.2012.txt

The .2012 is not considered as being part of the extension. And if you type MyFile.2012 in the File dialog box and .2012 is not listed as a file extension (or associated with another application), then Windows assumes it is part of the file name and name does not have an extension – hence it adds the default extension.

Fookes Software, the company that produces NoteTab, is based in Switzerland. The white cross on the red background represents the Swiss flag.

The main reason behind this type of issue is that Windows or a protection utility is not allowing NoteTab to save its settings to disk. Usually this happens because NoteTab is configured to save its settings under the Program Files folder. When you are running Windows 7 or Vista, or running Windows XP/2000 without administrative privileges, or using certain anti-virus products, programs cannot save data in protected folders, like Program Files and WINDOWS.

By default, NoteTab 7, 6 and 5 are designed to store settings under the Application Data folder (AppData\Roaming on Windows 7 and Vista). However, if you’ve installed NoteTab over version 4.x to retain your settings, NoteTab will work the old way and continue to save settings under the Program Files folder. The solution is to move NoteTab’s INI file to the Application Data folder. This procedure is explained above in the How do I transfer settings from NoteTab 4 to NoteTab 7? FAQ topic.

Yes, NoteTab includes a full context-sensitive help file. Just press F1 from any screen in the program to open the appropriate section. Or select Help | Help Topics from the menu.

NoteTab also includes specialized help files for Clip programming, and Regular Expressions. Plus a tutorial on using Outline files. All are available from NoteTab’s Help menu.