Writing diary

The editor has support for adding pictures, using different fonts, font sizes, font colours, writing in any UTF8-language by using some input method etc. There is also support for adding media files (video, music) to the notes but this is actually handled by mediaplayer so this functionality is described in Media player section.

Different fonts and input methods

In the screenshot below you can see different fonts in use. I've also typed some chinese using scim-input method. The controls for changing fonts are under the text editor area. You can change font family, font size, font colour and make the text underlined, bold or italic.

Adding pictures

There's 2 ways to add pictures.
Drag and drop the picture to editor

Drag and drop pictures from filebrowser.
Drag and drop pictures from webpages.
Drag and drop links to pictures (from msn, irc or where ever, the picture the link is pointing to is downloaded and added to diary)

Dragging and dropping from web browser may fail sometimes due to some technical issues. If this happens just save the picture first to your computer and add it from there.

Or use the "Add picture"-button
Click the button on the left side of the controls to change font. This will open a dialog that allows you to choose a picture you wish to add. After choosing a picture a new dialog opens and lets you adjust the size of the picture, at the same time a preview is shown to give a rough idea how it looks. At this point the quality of the shown picture may be litle bad but it will get better after you close the dialog.
1. Click the button highlighted in screenshot below

2. Choose the picture you wish to add

3. Adjust the size of the picture. A preview is shown in editor.

4. After closing the dialog the picture is scaled using a litle better(and slower) algorithm and should look smoother than while previewing

Rescaling the picture after closing the dialog for adjusting the size is not possible at the moment so if you need to rescale just remove and add the picture again.

Search text from entries

Since version 0.12 there is a list showing all the entries you have written with date and short clip from the entry. This should make it easier to go through old entries and find some specific entry. There's also search field that can be used to find some phrase from entries. The list will be updated to contain only the entries that hold the wanted phrase in real time as you type something in the search field.

List for searching entries. The calendar can be found from "Calendar"-tab.

Saving diary

There's no save/save as/open buttons. The saving is done automatically when changing the date or closing the diary. By default the diary is saved in users own home folder. This means that if there are more than one people using the same computer and they all want to use Xiaoning's diary, they all should have their own user accounts for the computer. If there's not enough space in the default folder for saving the diary, the folder can be changed. In this case only the user specific settings remain in users home folder and all the entries and all data related to them (pictures and media) is stored to where ever you want them to be saved. To change the folder choose Settings -> Saving settings. This will open a dialog that allows you to change the saving folder (This can be on different disk or even USB-stick if you wish, just be cautious when using USB-sticks since the mount point of the stick might change after unplugging it and this would cause some errors).

If you wish that all existing entries are moved to the new location, leave the mark on Move existing diary to new folder. If you don't move the existing entries when changin the folder, they won't be listed anymore since entries are looked only from current saving folder.