HTML-Tidy Gedit Plugin

• Purpose
• Download, Install, and Activate
• Use
  • Checking for Problems
  • Correcting Problems
• Configure
  • Accessing the Configuration Dialog
  • Setting HTML Tidy's Options
  • Setting the File Types

Purpose

When editing HTML it's easy to make mistakes. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a simple way to fix these mistakes automatically and tidy up sloppy editing into nicely layed out markup? Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy is a free utility for doing just that.

This is an HTML Tidy plugin for gedit, the default text editor for the Gnome Desktop. Once activated, this plugin allows:

• Fixing an HTML (or XHTML, or XML) document being written (from within gedit)
• Listing the errors and warnings of an HTML (or XHTML, or XML) document (without fixing it)
• Configuring HTML Tidy

Download, Install, and Activate

First, please make sure that HTML Tidy is installed on your system (e.g., via sudo apt-get install tidy). Following that, you can download, install, and activate the plugin using the following steps:

1. Download html-tidy-gedit-plugin.tar.gz, and extract the contents to gedit's plugin directory (typically, ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/).
2. Restart gedit.
3. Select Edit → Preferences → Plugins. Check the plugin as in the next screenshot.

Use

The following screenshot shows a very basic HTML example. We'll see Checking for Problems and Correcting Problems.

Checking for Problems

To check for problems, select Tools → Tidy Check. The bottom pane (which can be shown through Ctrl + F9) will show the problem report. Clicking on a row in the bottom pane will place the insert cursor at the location of the corresponding problem. The following screenshot shows a report for two problems: a missing <!Doctype> declaration, and a missing title element.

Correcting Problems

If you are reasonably pleased with your document, you might trust Tidy to correct it by selecting Tools → Tidy. The following screenshot shows the result.

Note that Tidy inserted some stuff, like the empty <title></title> pair. This empty title might not be what your page needs, but no HTML validity check will indicate further problems with the title element. You might consider, therefore, first Checking for Problems.

Configure

Accessing the Configuration Dialog

You can access the configuration dialog in one of two (equivalent) ways:

1. Select Edit → Preferences → Plugins, highlight this plugin, and click Configure Plugin.
2. Selecte Tools → Configure Tidy...

The following screenshot shows the configuration dialog:

Now we have the configuration dialog, which has just two frames. We'll cover them in Setting HTML Tidy's Options and Setting the File Types.

Setting HTML Tidy's Options

HTML Tidy comes with quite a few configuration options. You can set them using the radio options in the configuration dialog's HTML Tidy Options frame:

• Default: This just uses whatever HTML Tidy decides is the defaults. (Note: If you write non-English HTML pages - you don't want this.)
• From File: This parses and uses an HTML Tidy configuration file.
• Custom: This allows you to manually set each option, using the dialog in the next screenshot:

Setting the File Types

Suppose you're editing a Python source, your LaTeX thesis, or just a (non-HTML) suicide note. You probably don't want to run HTML Tidy on these, and it would be nice if the relevant actions (Tools → Tidy and Tools → Tidy Check) were just disabled when you do this. You can set this using the radio options in the configuration dialog's File Types frame:

• Mime Types: The actions will be available only if gedit decides the document's Mime-type is HTML, XHTML, or XML
• By Extension: The actions will be available only if the active document's file type extension is one of a list.
• all: The actions are always available.