You can find a detailed description of the technical preconditions and the implementation of the PC Editor in the SAPscript online help (Basis -> Basis Services -> SAPscript).
1. What do the two application toolbars above the editor window mean?
The upper application toolbar contains all the paragraph formats of a text that can be used for formatting. The second application toolbar shows the character formats which can be used. Paragraph and character formats are stored in the respective form or style of the text.
2. How can you format paragraph or character strings?
Paragraph or character strings can be formatted in two ways:
a) by selecting a text area with the mouse and then pressing a pushbutton for paragraph or character formats
b) or by pressing a pushbutton for paragraph or character formats and simply updating the text (without text selection)
3. How can you determine the current paragraph and character formats at a certain cursor position?
Position the cursor at a certain point in the text and press the key "Display format" (Choose Edit -> Display formats).
4. How do you insert symbols and commands into the text?
In the line editor, additional SAPscript information, that is, symbols, commands, text elements, comments, SAP character sets and links, were handled as normal body text. This changed in the PC Editor. Additional information must be included in the PC Editor via a special dialog box. After the inclusion, additional information is listed in gray and displayed as write-protected in fields. A subsequent processing of the additional information is carried out with the same dialog box (creation and change of additional information). Consequently, you no longer need the format column available in the line editor.
(see also: R/3 online help PC Editor -> Create additional information)
5. How can you select fields for commands, symbols, comments and so on?
You can select fields simply by double-clicking. In earlier releases, you must position the cursor in front of the field and either drag the mouse across the field with the pressed left key or use the key "Right Cursor" while pressing the SHIFT key. Note that a field starts to flash if the cursor was positioned on it. The field is not selected in this case!
6. How can you reset character formats?
You can reset character formats via the button "Reset character formats". All character formats are generally reset in Release 4.5A within a selected text area. In earlier releases you must differentiate whether the characters in the selected area have the same format or not. If the formatting is the same, you can choose which character formats should be cancelled. If the formatting differs, the character format restarted last is cancelled in each case.
7. What happens if the number of paragraph or character formats is so large that only some keys fit on the corresponding application toolbar?
If the respective form or style to a text contains many character or paragraph formats, the width of the editor window is no longer sufficient to display all pushbuttons (example:Texts in documentation maintenance SE61).
Here, a different technical problem exists. It is planned to generally display formats in Comboboxes. At the moment you can only access the non-visible formats by choosing menu 'Formats -> Character/Paragraph.
8. Why are the buttons for the paragraph and character formats not implemented as toggle keys (see MS WORD)?
A constant display of updated formats as toggle buttons would require communication between presentation and application servers after each cursor transaction. This does not make much sense from a performance point of view.
9. Why does the tab alignment in the WYSIWYG display of the PC Editor in certain cases not correspond to the print preview in WYSIWYG view of the PC editor?
The WYSIWYG view of the PC Editor uses a Windows font on the Frontend. The print preview displays the system or printer font actuallybeing used. Windows font and printer font are usually not completely identical, that is, sometimes minor differences occur in the metric which cannot be avoided. In certain cases, the tab position can be moved by one character due to these inaccuracies. The only way to achieve an exact presentation of the tabs is by installing the printer font as an R/3 System font. Note that only the print preview displays an exact output (see Note 90437); the PC editor, however, is independent of the device type.
10. How can I deactivate the PC Editor for installation problems?
You usually select the PC Editor or the line editor within the editor via the menu option Goto-> Configure editor. If problems occur when you call the PC editor, for example in the form maintenance or in application transactions, you can also set the editor in the initial screen of the standard text editor (Transaction SO10). To do so, choose Utilities -> SAPscript -> Standard text -> Settings.
Alternatively, you can make the editor settings using the ABAP Workbench (SE80) with Utilities -> Settings, tab SAPscript.
11. Why do apparently unnecessary "<" and ">" characters appear in the text editor when switching from PC Editor to the line editor?
In the PC editor, SAPscript additional information (that is, symbols, commands, text elements, comments, SAP character sets as well as links) are highlighted in gray and displayed in fields as write-protected. Whenyou change from the PC Editor to the line editor, these fields must be internally reconverted into SAPscript syntax, for example, symbols in "&" notation. Generally, characters "&", "<" and ">" have a special meaning in SAPscript. They stand for special characters (similar to Escape characters in HTML that are then continually interpreted by SAPscript). If you enter such characters in the PC editor as a "normal" text, then these special characters are masked when you change into the line editor to prevent the character string from being interpreted incorrectly. A masking of special characters occurs in SAPscript via the raw character format
"...".
The character string "&V1&" for example prevents symbol &V1& from being interpreted in documentation texts.
However, the masking of special characters is suppressed in unique cases (see Note 180655).
12. Why does an extended line format "=" sometimes appear in the tag column when switching from the PC Editor to the line editor?
See Note 141858
13. Why is it not displayed in the status line of the GUI window whether the insert or replace mode (INS/OVW) of the PC Editor is enabled?
Due to technical reasons, these functions can currently not be realized.
14. Why is the text cursor (Caret) not displayed as a rectangle in the overwrite mode?
When you use proportional fonts, it is no longer possible to change the Caret into a rectangle at the current text position to display the overwrite mode of the editor. With narrow letters such as "i" or a period, the caret would be reduced to just a few pixels and would no longer be traceable. This behavior is common in all usual text processing. Moreover, the performance of the editor would suffer strongly since a recalculation would have to occur for every caret movement.
15. On which platforms is the PC Editor available?
The PC Editor is available as of Release 4.0A and only runs under Win32 (that is, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT,...) in a SAPGUI for Windows. The PC Editor is not available in SAPGUI for HTML (ITS) and SAPGUI for Java. On these platforms, the system automatically switches to the line editor (also refer to Notes 64634, 164602 und 318834).
16. Why does the PC Editor not consider a predefined line width, e.g. 72 characters?
The PC Editor is a WYSIWYG editor, that is, the text display in the editor corresponds to the future print output. Therefore, the width of the editor window always corresponds to the window width of the corresponding form of a text (e.g. SYSTEM form). A line break only occurs if no more space is available in the form window during the character output. A fix line width does not make any sense in a WYSIWYG editor since usually, proportional fonts are used which contain characters with different widths (e.g. "i" and "w"). A predefined line width only affects the text display in the line editor.
17. Why is the formatting sometimes lost at the end-of-text character of the PC editor?
The editor control does not assign any formatting to the end-of-text character. For this reason, it may happen that after saving the text with a blank line at the end of the text and a new callup of the editor, formatting in the last line is lost. Internally, formatting is still marked but is not displayed when new text is entered. To solve the problem, please use pushbutton "Reset character formats" and format the text line again.
18. Why can formatting sometimes not be set before the end-of-text character of the PC editor?
Prerequisite: A text ends with a blank new paragraph or a new line and has character formatting at the end of the previous paragraph / the previous line.
Example in ITF format:
* Hello World
*
This text is added in the PC editor: further text is entered before the end-of-text character, it is marked and assigned the character format of the previous line/paragraph. The editor does not show any change. When calling the editor again, the change is also visible in the editor. To solve the problem, please use pushbutton "Reset character formats" and format the text line again.
19. Why are symbols and tabulators not allowed in documentation links in the PC-Editor?
In the PC Editor, symbols and links are represented as RTF fields. In the RTF specification, the nesting of fields is not allowed, however. When loading such fields in MS Word, for example, the nested field is simply ignored. In the PC Editor, the entire text is locked for entry.
Example for a link with symbol:
The same applies to tabulators in fields that are represented within SAPscript as " ". For this reason, please avoid symbols and tabulators in documentation links, or use the line editor as workaround.
20. How can new fonts be used in the PC Editor?
First define a new printer font, e.g. ZARIAL, in the SAP System using font maintenance (Transaction SE73) as described in Note 12462. Then maintain the RTF font information for the representation in the PC Editor (Table TF016). This is done in the font maintenance as well, as described in Note 130658.