Inserting Attachments
Documents and files you reference in your work can be added into the flow of your RSpace documents as attachments. You might want to add things like as MS Office files or PDFs, or perhaps more obscure file formats. All can be placed into your RSpace document and referenced from it. Attachments added to documents are added automatically to the gallery and thus, become available for use in your other documents. Attachments are links to the attached resource.
Inserting Attachments from the Gallery
You can insert documents into your Gallery, where they will be filed in separate tabs for known document types (Documents gallery) and types not known to the system (Miscellaneous gallery). There is also a special gallery section for PDFs exported from RSpace (PDF Gallery). Files from the Gallery can then be added to a document while editing by using the ‘Insert’ menu and and selecting ‘From Gallery’.
Inserting Attachments not in the Gallery
Files you have stored outside of RSpace can be added to RSpace documents directly in the Editor window – they will appear as attachments in the flow of the text and will be added to the appropriate section of the Gallery in the background while you continue editing. Attachments can be inserted by drag-and-drop from another open window on your computer, or by one of the options in the ‘Insert’ menu.
Viewing Attachments
Attachments appear in the document as a bordered block containing an icon and a list of actions. ‘Download’ action allows viewing of the document by downloading from RSpace (to the local computer running the current viewing browser) and opening in any available appropriate application. ‘Info’ action gives information about the file in RSpace.
Many common file types including images, documents and chemistry structures can be viewed inside RSpace. For a list, see Supported File Types. RSpace can generate a PDF preview for many attachment types, for example MS Word files. If the attachment can be previewed you’ll see a magnifying glass icon displayed on top left of the attachment block, and a ‘View’ action on the actions list. Clicking on magnifying glass expands a preview and displays attachment information.
Clicking on ‘View’ opens a new tab (make sure your pop-up blocker allows it) with PDF version of the attached document. This way you can, for example, read MS Word files attached to RSpace documents without having MS Office package installed on your computer. Remember that ‘View’ action shows you the PDF version of the attachment, you need to use ‘Download’ action to get attached file in the original format.
After saving, any attachments now referenced by the document are now in the flow of the text, and are also listed at the foot of the page.
Clicking the ‘i’ button next to an attachment shows some basic properties of the file creation date, size, etc. You can add captions from within this information panel. Captions are searchable and can help you retrieve documents containing an attachment.
Updating new revisions of an attachment
- Attach a document that you can edit to an RSpace document, as described above.
- Now, do some edits to your attached file on your local machine.
- To replace the old attachment with the new one, simply highlight the text of the link in the editor, and drag and drop the new version into the editor. The link will be updated to the new version. All previous versions of the attachment are retained in RSpace and can be accessed via The Gallery.
- The GetInfo popup will automatically update with the new version’s properties.
