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Files and Documents

You can create several pages of text with VoodooPad, and like a word processor, when you save all the pages that you've created go into the single document.

However, unlike the pages in a word processor which represent printed pages, VoodooPad's pages represent ideas. They grow as large as needed to accommodate the text you add for the idea that the page represents. As long as you keep entering text in the page, it keeps growing.

To understand VoodooPad's notion of a document, let's start by opening the "LinksAndPages.vpdoc" document that we saved at the end of the last topic. The easiest way to do this in Mac OS X is to first make VoodooPad the active application. Do this by clicking on it's icon in the Dock. Then choose the File->Open Recent->LinksAndPage.vpdoc menu item. If you don't see LinksAndPage.vpdoc within that menu, it may have been discarded from the Recent Items list by other new documents that you've opened since you worked with it.

When the document has opened, hold down the command key and click the document icon in the Title bar of the window. This should open a drop-down menu showing the directories in the path to the document as menu item choices. If you drag to, and click on, one of the directories in the menu, of course, that directory will open in a Finder window, illustrating the fact that our VoodooPad document is similar in most ways to any other document or file on the system.

There is another way that VoodooPad are dissimilar to a word processor's pages. Within the VoodooPad document there is no "natural" sequence of pages. Like the web, any VoodooPad page is a click away on an appropriate hyperlink. And, of course, this is a natural way to organize ideas. Any given page is a single page (or click) away from any other page on which there is a link to it.

This is what helps VoodooPad organize our minds. As we write about an idea or concept on a named page, we naturally include words about related ideas on that page. The words for those related ideas can be made into pages of their own, in which case they are automatically related through links from the original page.

Where VoodooPad's pages represent ideas and are easy to physically relate to other pages for closely related ideas, a word processor uses a completely different model for pages. A word processor "page" is analogous to the printed page within a printed document. It is of a fixed size and comes in a predetermined sequence within the document. The printing of a word processor document is the natural consequence of creating such a document.

In the last topic, all the links that we created were to pages within the document that contained the link. This is convenient and works well for some situations. However, as our use of VoodooPad grows and we save several documents, it becomes increasingly useful to link between them.

To establish a link from one VoodooPad document to another, it helps to think of the source document which will contain the link we're trying to establish, and the target document which will be where we end up when we click the link.

First, make sure you have two documents open in VoodooPad, and make sure they have been saved. Next, click and hold the proxy icon in the title bar of the source document (the proxy icon is the little graphic in the toolbar next to the name of the document). Drag the proxy icon into a page of the target document. VoodooPad will then ask if you want pick a page in the document, or just link to the whole document. Choose "Pick Page".

A new sheet will come up asking for the name of the page you want to link to. Find your page in the combo box, and press "Insert". Tada! You've successfully created an inter-document link.

Next: Importing and Exporting.