### 3.1 Working with Charts

Msc-generator has a built-in text editor with color syntax highlighting. You can edit the chart description there. When you are ready, press the ‘`Update Chart`’ button on the very left of the ribbon (or F2 on the keyboard) and the visual view of the chart will get updated. Any error or warning messages will show up in the error panel at the bottom. You can click on them to jump to the location of the error in the input file or use F8 and Ctrl+F8 to access them. If the error is not in the main file (but in an included file or design library), Msc-generator does not load it, but merely gives a small sound.

You can use the Main button on the ribbon or the quick access items in the window title to load/save the file. The file format is simply text, the very same that you edit inside Msc-generator’s text editor. You can also save the graphical rendering of the file in various graphics formats using the `Main|Export...` item. A third alternative is to export the file as a PNG image and save the chart text with it. Then opening the PNG file, will also bring back the chart text. To do this, you simply need to select PNG as a file format in the Open and Save dialog boxes. Pressing the Main button you also find the usual Print and Print Preview commands.

The first pane of the Ribbon always shows the type of chart currently opened (such as Signalling Chart, Graphviz Graph or Block Diagram). The buttons in the second column of this pane enables you to enter tracking mode (see Tracking Mode); to turn automatic splitting (Auto Split) on or off; or to enable the showing of collapse/expand controls for entity groups and boxes (Collapsing and Expanding)1.

The third column has additional controls to govern chart appearance. The exact controls depend on the chart type. For graphs, the layout algorithm used can be selected here. For graphs and signalling charts there is a design and page selector. By selecting a chart design here you can override the selection in the source file. This is an easy way of reviewing how your chart would look like in a particular design. See Chart Designs for more info on chart designs. With the page selectors, you can navigate around in multi-page charts. If ‘`all`’ is selected then pagination is ignored and the whole chart is shown. (See Multiple Pages for more info on pagination commands for signalling charts. For graphs each graph defined in sequence ends up in a separate page.) Finally, for graphs using the ‘`Collapse all`’ and ‘`Expand all`’ buttons you can collapse or expand all cluster subgraphs with a single click.

The Clipboard pane on the ribbon has two set of Copy/Paste operations: one for text in the text editor and a separate set for the entire chart. If you use paste for the entire chart, then its whole content is replaced, whereas if you paste into the editor, the content of the clipboard will be inserted.

You can also perform undo or redo from the Edit pane of the ribbon or by pressing Ctrl+Z or Ctrl+Y. Similar search and replace operations for the text editor can also be accessed from the Edit pane.

Finally, there is a separate button in the Edit pane to start and stop the internal or an external text editor (see External Editor). The latter is useful in case you prefer to use your own editor.

#### Footnotes

##### (1)

Some of these buttons may not be available for all chart types. E.g., graphs have no heading and thus does not support AutoSplit.