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(Note: This page lists the most commonly used features and functions to help get you started as quickly as possible in using WebSpeedReader. For a complete reference to WebSpeedReader's many capabilities, read the complete help and tutorial ( | F1). Reading this document might be confusing at first, but if you read it and the Help & Tutorial as you are using WebSpeedReader, you'll start to understand it, and appreciate it as a faster and better way to browse, read, and search the Internet. But, it does take time to learn.
Tip: Read this help and the Help & Tutorial a section at a time, before and during the time that you are using WebSpeedReader. This is easy to do, because when you bring up either Help file, the table of contents is displayed in the sidebar. Just click on a topic in the sidebar to go to that topic in the Help. And because you are reading the Help file in WebSpeedReader, you can try out anything you read about right away.
If you find any bugs, report them by selecting from the menu. Also, bug fixes and upgrades are always posted in the What's New page, which can be accessed by selecting . From this page, you can upgrade WebSpeedReader by downloading the upgrade file, which is much smaller than the original download. The upgrade can be downloaded and installed in literally less than 2 minutes. If you encounter a bug, always check here first for any bug fixes, even if you just downloaded WebSpeedReader.
The mouse is used differently in WebSpeedReader than in Internet Explorer. The functions have been changed to associate the most commonly used functions with the simplest mouse commands. This may be confusing at first, but you will see that this makes browsing a much better experience. Thus, right-clicking the mouse in WebSpeedReader displays the next window rather than showing the context menu. Scrolling with the mouse wheel pages up and down rather than moving 3 lines up or down at a time, which is the Window's default. To get Internet Explorer's default action, just press the Ctrl key as you right-click or scroll the mouse wheel. When you right-click selected text, you will get WebSpeedReader's context menu.
Pressing the Ctrl key while right-clicking a selection, shows IE's context menu for a selection. More will be said about how to use the mouse in WebSpeedReader, but here is a quick summary of the functions in IE's context menus:
Ctrl + right-clicking the document yields these options:
Back - move back in the window's history for documents that you visited earlier in the same session in the same window.
Forward - move forward in history. Because of the way WebSpeedReader works, the Back and Forward functions will not be as useful as they are in other browsers, because WebSpeedReader minimizes the need to go back and forward in history. More on this later.
Save Background As... - If a document has a background image, you can save this image to disk by selecting this option. However, this option will disabled if the document does not have a background image.
Set as Background - Sets the background image of the current document as the background image of your desktop. The background image becomes the current wallpaper for your desktop. To change it, or remove it, right-click on your desktop, select Properties, select Desktop, then choose the wallpaper you want, or None, if you just want to remove it. Note that the wallpaper you choose with Set as Background will be listed as Internet Explorer Wallpaper in the wallpaper list. Thus, you can select this wallpaper at any time.
Copy Background - Presumably this copies the background, but you can't paste it in anything, not even an editable document, so it's not very useful.
Set as Desktop Item - This copies the image used for the document background to your desktop. The difference between this option and the Set as Background option is that this option shows the image as its actual size, is not listed as wallpaper, and is removed or moved by hovering the mouse over the top of the image until the title bar is displayed. You move the image by dragging the title bar. You can close the image by clicking the X in the upper right-hand corner, just like a form. Because the image doesn't cover the whole background—unless it is really large or you have a low-resolution monitor—you can have various images displayed on your desktop as a collage.
Select All - This selects everything on the web page for copying.
Paste - This option will usually be grayed, because most web pages aren't editable, and thus, nothing can be pasted on them.
Create Shortcut - Creates a shortcut to the current document on your desktop. Just click the shortcut to go there again.
Add to Favorites - This adds the current document to Internet Explorer's Favorites. Note that WebSpeedReader, though it imports IE's Favorites, uses a database to store Favorites, which makes it much more usable (more on this later). Select | A | Shift+F6 to add to WebSpeedReader's Favorites.
View Source - WebSpeedReader has its own View Source feature that is color-coded and shows the source of all frames in 1 document. However, if you want a plain text view, or you want to copy code to paste into something else, then select this option. If the document has frames, then this option will show the source code for the right-clicked frame.
Encoding... - This option allows you to change the character set used to display the document.
Print... - Prints the current document.
Refresh - Refreshes the current document by downloading the document again.
Properties - This shows such properties as title, URL, the created and modified date.
Ctrl + right-clicking a link, which may be a hyperlink text or an image:
Open Link or Open Link in New Window - These options aren't very useful in WebSpeedReader. All links that are normally clicked download in the background anyway, so just clicking the link is much faster.
Save Target As... - Presents the File Save dialog box to save the target of a link. In most cases, you will probably want to see what the target of the link is before you save it. There are various ways to save the current document under the menu.
Print Target As... - Prints the target file. Again, in most cases, you'll probably want to see the document first before printing it. The menu has options for Page Setup, Print Preview, and Printing the current document.
Ctrl + right-clicking a picture:
Show Picture - In this case, you would be Ctrl + right-clicking the icon for the picture rather than the picture itself. This option shows the picture if the Display Images option in Internet Options has been turned off.
Save Picture As... - Displays a Windows dialog box that allows you to save the image to a file.
Email Picture - Opens your email client with a new message, adding the picture as an attachment.
Print Picture - Guess what this does!
Go To My Pictures - This opens Windows Explorer to display the My Pictures directory.
Set as Background, Set as Desktop Item - This is the same feature mentioned earlier, but uses the selected picture instead of the background image. Set as Background expands the image to cover the entire desktop, whereas Set as Desktop Item shows the picture in its original dimensions.
Copy - Copies the picture to the clipboard so that it can be pasted into another editable document. The document will usually be from another application because most documents displayed in the browser are not editable.
Copy Shortcut - Copies the URL to the picture to the clipboard, so that it can be pasted elsewhere.
Add to Favorites - This adds the URL of the picture to Internet Explorer's Favorites.
Properties - This shows the picture's size and dimensions, in addition to the other properties listed above.
Ctrl + right-clicking selected text:
Copy - If you want to copy selected HTML or text, then select this option.
Print - Print the selected text.
Cut, Paste - These options aren't very useful in a browser because most pages are not editable.
Select All - Selects everything on the web page, but you probably don't want this command if you have already selected text, so it's not very useful in this context.
Tip: You can delete any local file directly in WebSpeedReader by selecting | Ctrl+D. This option will not be enabled if the document in the current browser window is not from your computer. Also note that, because only the file is deleted, the document will still be loaded in the browser window until it is replaced with another document or WebSpeedReader is closed.
Although clicked links generally download in the background, there are 3 exceptions to this.
Clicked links in framed pages will cause navigation to occur in the targeted frame, which is usually the same frame as the clicked link, but sometimes can be another frame, or to a new window. A frame is a web page consisting of several documents. If a page has frames, WebSpeedReader will show this in the 3rd panel of the status bar. If you want the links in a frame to download in background windows, then shift + click them (hold the Shift key down while you click the link). This will open the link unframed in its own window, thereby enabling you to save it as a Favorite or to schedule it, since framed pages don't display their own URL. If you want to scroll in a particular frame and if it doesn't already have the focus, then click the frame first to select it.
Secure transactions, which use the https protocol, will download in the same window if the current document is also using the secure protocol. This is necessary to prevent errors. WebSpeedReader will automatically download secure requests to the same browser window that submitted the requests. If you don't want to wait for the downloads, you can continue reading other documents, if you have any, and come back to the results later. Cycling through the windows will eventually return you to the results page. Or you can select the window by clicking on its link in the sidebar. When it is fully downloaded, it will turn blue.
Any form submission that is submitted by a POST transaction. These are submissions where the form data is uploaded as part of the body rather than as part of the URL, known as a GET submission. Submitting a search term to Google, for instance, is a GET operation, where you can see your search embedded in the URL. POST transactions that don't download in the submitting window sometimes results in errors, which is why it is done this way. However, you can download a POST transaction in a background window by pressing the Shift key while submitting the form.
| t | Z | < , | Shift + F12 | ||
| u | X | > . | F12 | ź Del | |
Mnemonic: Next Window is a frequent command, so there are several keys that select it. The X and. have been selected because they are close to the space bar. Thus, you can easily page down with the space bar and select next by pressing the X or the., depending on whether you want to use your left or right hand. This feature is particularly useful if you are using a notebook computer that doesn't have a numeric keypad. If you have a numeric keypad, you will probably find it most convenient to use the 0 to page down and the. to move to the next document. If you have a lot of documents downloading in the background, the space bar sometimes doesn't page down, then you have to click the document or press Space Bar again to regain focus.
You can scroll with the usual keys: Page Up, Page Down, the arrow keys, Home to go to the beginning of the document, End to go to the end of the document. You can also scroll down using the space bar.
Rotating mouse wheel over the document scrolls the page up or down 1 page for each notch (requires Internet Explorer 6).
Holding the right mouse button down while turning mouse wheel scrolls the page the default number of lines, which is usually Window's default value, 3.
While holding the right mouse button down, click the document to scroll to the top of the document or double click it to go to the end of the document.
Alt + mouse wheel scrolls the page a few lines at a time up or down.
Mouse wheel Panning - Quickly scroll a document in any direction, even horizontally or diagonally, by pressing the mouse wheel, and moving the mouse in the desired direction. When you want to stop scrolling, simply release the mouse wheel. Tip: You can also pan the sidebar.
Auto-scroll - Click mouse wheel on blank area of document to turn on auto-scroll, which scrolls the document continuously until it reaches the top or bottom. Auto-scroll has 2 marks, a center mark and a scrolling mark. Dragging the scrolling mark up, scrolls up; dragging it down, scrolls down. The farther the scrolling mark is moved from the center mark, the faster it scrolls. Clicking any mouse button stops it.
Tip: With the mouse only, you can scroll up or down 1 page at a time, a few lines at a time, go to the top of the document, or go to the end of the document, or move horizontally or diagonally. You can move to the next document by right-clicking the mouse, if the document doesn't have selected text, and the focus isn't a textbox.
Note: In a document that consists of multiple frames, the focus moves with the mouse pointer; thus, if you hover the mouse over a frame that cannot be scrolled, you won't be able to scroll in the main frame until you move the mouse pointer over the document that you want to scroll, or click the frame.
On the numeric keypad (the 1st column shows the numeric keys as they appear on most keyboards, a close simulation, anyway):
| 0 Ins | Page down. |
| ź Del | Go to the next document. |
| 1 End | Page up. |
| 2 ¤ | Go to top of document. |
| 3 PgDn | Go to bottom of document. |
| 4 ť | Go to next document, but keep current one in memory. (Keep in Memory) |
| 7 Home | Go to the home page of the current URL. |
Note: It may appear incongruous to designate a key such as the 1 key which is usually the End key when NumLock is off as the Page Up key, but it is done this way for the greatest convenience. Because most of the time you will be paging down and going to the next document, it is most comfortable to have those 2 keys at the bottom of the keypad, the 0 and the decimal key next to it to page down and go to the next document respectively. Try it!
Occasional Problem: Sometimes, because of background operations, the current browser window loses focus, and using the keypad keys doesn't work. Just click in the document to give it focus again.
As you click on more links and download more documents, WebSpeedReader opens more windows. Eventually, as you read the documents, the windows containing read documents will be reused to download other documents. This is how WebSpeedReader conserves memory. However, any window where you have toggled Keep in Memory on ( | K | F3 | keypad: 4 ) will not be re-used. Whenever Keep in Memory is toggled, it will also display the next page, so do this after you are done with the document for the time being.
As you click on more links and download more documents, WebSpeedReader opens more windows. Eventually, as you read the documents, the windows containing read documents will be reused to download other documents. This is how WebSpeedReader conserves memory. However, any window where you have toggled Keep in Memory will not be re-used.The following items can be selected from the menu under submenu or from the context menu by right-clicking on any window in the sidebar.
Windows can also be managed from the sidebar:
View Favorites ( | F | F6) displays your favorites in a separate form. The Favorites form has 2 modes, download mode and organize mode, which you can toggle by clicking the top command button. When you select View Favorites, download mode will be in effect. You can click as many links as you like; each link will download in a separate browser window. You can download links by:
Clicking on them individually.
Click on a folder to download all links in that folder, but not subfolders.
Ctrl+click to download all links in that folder and all subfolders.
Shift+click a link to download all links between it and a previously downloaded link in the same folder, or if there isn't any, then it will download all links from the top of the folder to the clicked link.
Right-click on a folder to rename, edit, delete, or add a new favorite. Right-click a link to rename, edit, or delete the link. Right-clicking anywhere else brings up more options.
Quick Links is shown in the sidebar under the Links tab ( ∞ ). This displays the links that show up on the link bar in Internet Explorer. Keep your most commonly clicked links, that aren't scheduled, here. You can also view Quick Links in the Favorites form by right-clicking on an empty part of the tree view, and select Quick Links from the context menu.
Sidebar - Quickly Filter Favorites or History to Display in Sidebar - In the textbox at the top of the sidebar, you can type in a few characters and click F in the second toolbar at the top, just to the right of the textbox to filter your list of Favorites, which will be displayed below, in the sidebar. This selects all favorites that have the typed characters in the title, URL, or keywords. Some tips: (1) type in a domain to select all Favorites with that domain; (2) enter "file://" or "c:\" to select all files on your disk; (3) enter "foldername\subfoldername" to display all links in that subfolder. Remember to press Enter after typing in your letters to display the new list.
Special Filters - There are special filters that will display particular links. All the special filters start with a letter, which is case insensitive and designates the type of filter to apply, followed by a space.
∞ tab - Displays your Quick Links in the sidebar. If you want to remove a link from the Quick Links bar, just right-click on the link, and select Remove from Quick Links from the context menu.
¸ tab - Shows all links that are scheduled. If you don't want to read all the links scheduled for today, then the next best thing is to show all scheduled links, and click on the ones that you want. If you want to unschedule any links, simply right-click the link, and select Unschedule from the context menu.
Tip: If you want to schedule a link or add a link to the Quick Links list, then simply select Edit from the context menu. You can also delete any link from the same menu.
H tab - Type some characters in the filter box, then click the H tab to display all history entries with the typed characters in the title, URL, keywords, or description, if you maintain history. Thus, law will show all history entries that have law in the title or URL. Entering yahoo.com will show all of your history entries that have the domain yahoo.com. Note that maintaining history is on by default, but you can turn it off, and it will erase all history entries. However, if you do this, then the history filter will obviously have no effect.
F tab - Clicking the F tab will filter your Favorites list. Thus, entering "blog" in the filter box will display all links with "blog" in the title, URL, or keywords. Enter "science\history" to display all links in your science\history subfolder, assuming that you have such a folder (probably not). Remember to press Enter after typing in your letters to display the new list.
Note: WebSpeedReader maintains its own history list. Therefore, filtering the history list will show few or no results when you first start using it.
Organize Favorites - Organize mode allows you to move, copy, rename, and delete links and folders. Because folders are nothing more than a group of links with the same keywords, any action on a folder is simply an action on all of the links with the same keywords. The available commands can be accessed by clicking on the command buttons on the right, or right-click on an empty part of the tree view for the context menu. You can access commands in the context menu either by clicking on the desired command, or after the right-click, continue holding down the right mouse button, highlight the desired command, then release the right mouse button. To move, copy, or delete links, you must first select links. Select links by:
Clicking on them individually.
Click on a folder to select all links in that folder, but not subfolders.
Ctrl+click to select all links in that folder and all subfolders.
Shift+click a link to select all links between it and a previously selected link in the same folder, or if there isn't any, then it will select all links from the top of the folder to the clicked link.
When 1 or more links are selected, then the copy, move, and delete commands are enabled. If copy or move is selected, then click the folder where you want the links moved or copied. After this is done, then all selected links are deselected. If you want to copy or move to a new folder, then after selecting copy or move, select the New Folder command, then click the folder where you want to place the new folder. You'll be placed in edit mode. Type in the name of the new folder, press ENTER, and the files will be copied or moved, depending on which command you selected prior to selecting the New Folder command.
Undeleting links - When links are deleted, they are moved to a special folder in Favorites called Delete. You can restore any deleted link by selecting 1 or more links in this folder, then moving them to another folder. When WebSpeedReader is closed, then the links in this folder will be deleted permanently.
Add to Favorites ( | A | Shift+F6) - Add the current page to Favorites. This form will load with the title and URL of the link, and also the document keywords and description if available. If it is not available, then you can add your own. You can also select a category from the tree view on the left side of the form, or you can create a new category simply by typing in the keywords textbox. Use the backslash (\) to create different levels of categories. Examples: Typing Science in the keywords box creates the Science category if it doesn't already exist; entering Science\Biology creates a Science category with a subcategory of Biology. If the Science category already exists, then it will simply create the subcategory Biology if it doesn't already exist. If it does exist, then your new Favorite will be stored in that subcategory. Of course, if the category already exists, you can select it from the tree view on the left instead of typing it. Also, with the Add to Favorites form:
Notes - You can add notes for each bookmark.
Home Pages - You can add the page as a home page. WebSpeedReader allows any number of home pages. These are pages that load up every time you start WebSpeedReader. If you have home pages, but want to prevent them from loading, simply press the Shift key while the program is loading. WebSpeedReader will then load a blank page. If you have a dial-up connection, WebSpeedReader will automatically dial the connection if you are not already online. You can cancel the dial-up connection.
Scheduling - Any page can be scheduled for every day, every weekday, any day of the week, and for any week of the month. Thus, to schedule a page for every Monday, click on the Monday checkbox; to schedule a page for Tuesday and Thursday, check the boxes for Tuesday and Thursday; to schedule a page for the 1st and 3rd Wednesday of the month, check the Wednesday box, then check the 1 and 3 boxes of the Week-of-Month frame. If you want to schedule a page for every week, then do NOT check any Week-of-Month checkbox. Week of month is only checked if you want to restrict the downloads to specific weeks of the month. To download the scheduled web pages, just select | Shift+F2.
Quick Link - Add any page to the Quick Links sidebar by checking the Quick Links box.
Add to Favorites Form Submissions - Because WebSpeedReader now uses a database to store Favorites, it is now possible to not only save links as Favorites, but also any type of form submission, including password logons. Thus, any kind of form submission can easily be automated with WebSpeedReader. Now submitting data or logging onto password-protected sites is just a click on a Favorite. However, a warning: anyone who has access to your computer and can log on as you can also access your password-protected sites, effectively posing as you. Although the form data is not encrypted, passwords cannot easily be found, but they could be found by someone with enough knowledge and time. Therefore, do not use this feature if security is a potential problem! Saving these Favorites requires a special procedure.
Set Capture by selecting .
Fill in the form, then submit it.
When you press the submit button, the Add to Favorites form will load. 2 textboxes will be filled with the information from the form submission. This includes the URL and the post data. It is very important not to change either the URL or the post data unless you know what you are doing; otherwise the submission will not work properly!
Note: For security reasons, any form containing file upload information cannot be captured. These are forms that allow you to upload a file on your computer to a server. It has what looks like a textbox with a Browse button next to it. Very few forms upload files, and so this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Tip: In the Add to Favorites form, quickly clear any textbox by pressing F4 or double-clicking it.
Also keep in mind, that web pages do change, and sometimes it may be necessary to recapture the information. You can add any other information to the record, including a category, adding it to your Quick Links list, or scheduling the page.
Overview - The bookmark manager stores your Favorites in a database, instead of using the lame file system approach that Internet Explorer uses. Much more information can be stored in it than would otherwise be possible. Additional information that can be saved includes document keywords, description, posted data, and notes. Bookmarks can also be scheduled in the Edit form, including being able to set more than 1 home page. The rest of this section will cover features of the bookmark manager that have not be covered in the Favorites section above.
Filtering the display of links - In either download mode or organize mode, you can filter the links by typing in letters in the text box in the upper-right corner of the Favorites form. Thus, typing in "law" will show all links that have the "law" in the keywords, title, or URL. You can either download the links or organize them.
Folders - To create a new folder, you can either type in new keywords when you add a favorite, or you can select a number of files, then select copy or move, then select New Folder, then click on the folder in the tree view where you want to add the new folder. You'll be placed in edit mode, so you can type in the new name of the new folder. Note that you must have links selected for copy or move in order to create a new folder. This is because, the so-called folders are not really folders in the file system, but rather hierarchies of keywords. Thus, if there are no records corresponding to a new folder, then that new folder cannot be created. Therefore, if you delete the last link in a folder, then that folder will also be deleted. The folders is used because it works basically the same way, and most people are familiar with the folder terminology. Note that any changes made to the Favorites in WebSpeedReader will NOT be reflected in Internet Explorer's favorites. An export option will be added in the near future.
Edit or delete a favorite without opening a form - Another great time-saver with WebSpeedReader's bookmark manager is the ability to edit or delete a Favorite without opening the Favorites form at all. When you are viewing a web page that you downloaded by selecting a link in the Favorites form, then you can either edit or delete that Favorite simply by selecting . If the current page was not downloaded by clicking on a Favorite, then these 2 options will not be enabled. In addition, there are also 2 toolbar buttons at the top that will be displayed when the current document is a Favorite. If you click Delete this Favorite, then the next document will also be displayed.
Tip: an easy way to get rid of Favorites that you never use is to View Favorites, then click a folder to download all Favorites in that folder, or Ctrl + click a folder to download all Favorites in that folder and all subfolders. Then view each page in WebSpeedReader. If you want to keep the Favorite, just select the next document. If you don't want it, simply Delete the Favorite by clicking on the toolbar button, and this will move you to the next document automatically. You can continue to do this until you have reviewed all of the Favorites that you downloaded. You can also edit any Favorite to add notes or to change the title, description, keywords, or anything else.
You can schedule pages for download by filling in the scheduling information in the Add to Favorites form, or by editing the Favorite links you want scheduled. You can schedule pages for daily, weekday, Monday - Sunday, or monthly. Check 1 or more of the boxes for Week of Month to download monthly. for instance, check Monday in the Day of Week frame and check 1 and 2 in the Week of Month frame to schedule a page for the 1st and 3rd Monday of every month. However, to download a page every Monday, just check the Monday checkbox in the Day of Week frame, and leave the checkboxes in the Week of Month frame unchecked.
Downloading scheduled pages - The submenu has a number of options to download pages. downloads the pages scheduled for today. Thus, if today were Monday, May 3, it would download all pages scheduled for daily, weekday, Monday, and the 1st Monday of every month. downloads all scheduled pages since you last downloaded scheduled pages, up to 6 days past. So if today is Thursday, and your last download was Monday, then this option will select all pages scheduled for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Note, however, that pages scheduled for daily and weekday will only be downloaded once.
Continuing Sessions - Sometimes you can't finish reading everything. You can close WebSpeedReader, then continue later by selecting from the submenu , which loads the documents that you haven't read yet. loads the same pages, but also downloads all pages scheduled for today.
Address box search - Type a ? in the address box, with the search terms following it, to display a Google search in the current browser window.
Select text in the document, then right-click and select either Google Search or Vivisimo Search from the context menu.
Sidebar - Google Search - A search box is always at the top of the sidebar. Just enter your search terms and press Enter to submit search. By default the G tab is highlighted, and thus, the search will be submitted to Google. By clicking the V tab, then the search will be submitted to Vivisimo, a search engine that clusters search results into categories. The results will download in a background window. Thus, you can submit searches as you read. Click the _—"_" for underscore; "H" is used for History—tab to highlight those terms in all documents, including all frames.
Search Page - ( | S | F9) Displays a search page of more than 50 search engines of different specialties, allowing you to quickly find just about anything. Enter your search terms in the textbox at the top, then click on any number of search engines; results from each search engine will be downloaded in separate browser windows in the background.
Find text in document - Ctrl+F display a textbox that allows you to search in the current document. This is the same dialog box that Internet Explorer uses.
Find files on your computer - ( | Shift+F3 ) - displays a Windows Explorer dialog box allowing you to search for specific files on your computer.
Highlight search terms - By entering characters in the textbox at the top of the sidebar, then clicking the _—"_" for underscore; "H" is used for History—tab, all occurrences of the characters will be highlighted, including all occurrences in frames. You can enter multiple terms that are highlighted separately by separately the terms or phrases with the backquote character `. This is the unshifted tilde key located next to the 1 key on the top row of most keyboards. The backquote key was chosen as a separator because it is rarely used in text. Click OK to highlight the text; click Cancel to stop highlighting. When highlighting is in effect, the menu item will be checked. The text will be highlighted for any active window, and for any downloaded documents in the active window (after the document has downloaded completely). Thus, to search for 2 presidents, you would enter in the textbox: "George Washington`Abraham Lincoln" without the quotes. The current document, if it contained only 1 sentence would look like this: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were two of the greatest presidents of the United States. Note that case is unimportant; so you could have entered "george washington`abraham lincoln" to get the same highlighting even though the text in the terms are capitalized.
Another option is to select text in the document, right-click and select Highlight Selection from the context menu. To turn highlighting off, just click the _ tab in the sidebar.
Another advantage is that you can also click the G for a Google search of the terms or a V for a Vivisimo search of the terms, in addition to highlighting the terms on all documents. Very convenient!
Note: This feature takes some processing power, so if you are highlighting many terms in a long document, or very common terms, it could take several seconds or more to see the effect. So when you are done with highlighting, be sure to turn it off by clicking on the _ tab again.
There are tabs on the second toolbar for more restricted searches. To use this, enter terms in the textbox on the second toolbar, then click one or more of the following tabs.
D - Define the word or phrase.
T - Look up synonyms and antonyms in the thesaurus.
M - Look it up in the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia.
C - Look it up in the Columbia Encyclopedia.
You can use more than 1 reference at a time for the same terms. Just click the tabs for the information that you want. Each page will download in the background. If you use the same reference for more than 1 word or phrase, then you can just press Enter after typing in the search terms to submit that search.
The textbox can be quickly cleared, either by double-clicking in it, or, if the textbox has focus, by pressing Esc.
You can also select any word or phrase in a document, right-click the document to bring up the context menu, which includes most of the options in the second toolbar that uses the textbox.
Tip: If you want to select a word, then double-click it, or press Ctrl + click a word to look it up in any reference in the context menu, or to just highlight by selecting the highlighting command.
The Columbia Encyclopedia has more concise entries than Microsoft's Encarta, but Encarta is more complete and better illustrated. Encyclopedia uses Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia. Most of the major articles are available to nonsubscribers (anything with a red asterisk beside it is restricted to subscribers). The Columbia Encyclopedia is not as good as Encarta but all of the articles are available and free of charge.
With this same context menu, you can also open an URL if the selected text is an URL, highlight the selected text, or search for it using either Google or Vivisimo.
Note: If nothing is selected in the document, then right-clicking a document takes you to the next document.
Note: The headings that are displayed are enclosed with the H1-H6 HTML tabs in the code of the page. This is usually the way headings are formed in web pages; however, it is easy to make a short paragraph look like a heading by formatting it as larger, centered text, but this is not a real heading in HTML, and thus, won't be displayed in the sidebar. Also, the sidebar will not display any documents that have frames. Most framed documents are short, and those that are long, generally have their own sidebar for navigating the document, which is a common use for frames. This feature is best for long documents that have headings.
Tip: Pressing the Esc key will clear the textbox. Double-clicking the textbox will also clear it, and set focus to it. This is a quick and easy way to delete what's in the textbox to start over.
You can now automatically log onto any site or submit form data automatically by saving the form data as a bookmark. (See Add to Favorites Form Submissions, above.)
You can also save a list of items that can be added to any textbox by right-clicking the textbox, and selecting the text from the popup menu. The item will replace anything already there. To create the menu, just select from the menu. In the textbox type any sort of information that you wish to have available in separate lines. The first 120 characters of each line will appear as a caption in the menu, but you can store any amount of information on any given line, and it will be inserted if it is not limited by the textbox or textarea itself. You might want to include such info as first name, last name, full name, etc. You can also easily include multiple identities, when you want to stay anonymous. However, if a number of people are using WebSpeedReader in your household, there is no need to add their identities, since the file that stores the information is different for each user.
Warning: The information is not encrypted, so you should not store sensitive information if security is a potential problem.
Note: For security reasons, any form containing a file upload textbox must be entered manually. Forms containing file upload textboxes allow you to upload a file on your computer to a server. It has what looks like a textbox with a Browse button next to it. Very few forms upload files, and so this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Remember that you can also log onto password-protected sites automatically by capturing the log on information in a bookmark. With this feature, you can log onto any website automatically by scheduling the page, or you can just click on a bookmark, just as you would any other Favorite.
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