View Menu

Show Layout: the document is displayed as it will appear on the printed page.

Show Ruler: the ruler displays information about paragraph settings and allows you to directly change paragraph settings for selected paragraphs by adding, repositioning, and removing ruler widgets

Show Margins: displays a line to indicate the editable area of the page, that is, the area within the margins that can be filled with text (Layout only). Margin guides do not print.

Show Invisibles: displays otherwise invisible characters (space, non-breaking space, tab, return, paragraph break, and page break) so you can fine tune a document’s layout. Also reveals text tables with 'hidden' borders.

Alternate Colors: the document is displayed with an alternate set of foreground and background colors for use in editing documents. White text on a blue background, for example, can relieve eyestrain. Headers and footers, as well as any text that was non-black in color appear unaltered.

Fit Page Width: the document is scaled so that the printed page’s width just fits the document’s window. When the window is resized by the user, the document scales up or down accordingly.

Fit Page: a document is scaled so that a whole printed page just fits the document’s window. When the window is resized by the user, the document scales accordingly.

Zoom In: increases the view scale (and disables Fit Page Width / Fit Page mode).

Zoom Out: decreases the view scale (and disables Fit Page Width / Fit Page mode).

Full Screen: grows the document window to fill the main display screen. Preferences may be set to disable Layout view, to hide the toolbar and ruler, and to enable alternate editing colors. Leopard hides the title bar; Tiger, for some reason, does not. In full screen mode, Bean's menu bar reveals itself when your mouse cursor nears the top edge of the screen. To exit full screen mode, press the Escape key, or deselect View > Full Screen (Shift+Cmd+f) in the menu bar.

Show Toolbar

Customize Toolbar

Live Word Count: shows a continuously updated word and character count (as well as a page count in Layout mode) in the status bar at the bottom of each document window. When text is selected, the status bar shows a word and character count for selected text in blue (instead of the usual black).

Get Info...

Statistics: displays detailed statistics for the current document.

Reveal File in Finder: opens a Finder window for the folder containing the current (saved) document. Note that the file's creation and modification dates are reported in the Preview pane of a Finder window in multi-column mode.

Locked File / Template: prevents the current (saved) file from being overwritten. Check this box and reopen the document in Bean to create an untitled copy of the original. This is how you create a ‘template’ file in Bean.

Backup at close: automatically creates a date-stamped and sequentially numbered backup copy of the saved document at the time it is closed and in the same folder as the original. Useful for version control, documentation, and archiving.

Read only file: prevents the document from being edited; useful for documentation (Read-Me files, etc.).

Backup every ... minutes: An automatic backup copy of the document's contents is saved at a user-specified interval and in the same folder as the original, with the word '(Backup)' inserted before the filename's extension. Automatic backup only occurs if the document has changed since the last automatic backup (whether current changes have been saved or not). Automatic backup is only available for rich-text formats and is activated on a per-document basis. Automatic backup saves an extra copy of the document at regular intervals, so that if the original file were to be accidentally erased or overwritten, the document's backup still exists. Unlike autosave*, Bean does not automatically revert to the backed-up version upon relaunch or reopening of the original document.

*Autosave is enabled under Bean Preferences > Documents > Autosave documents every ... minutes, and is intended to prevent your work from becoming lost due to unexpected circumstances (such as a power loss or program crash). Automatic backup should be considered an extra layer of security above Autosave (to be used, for instance, if Time Machine were unavailable).

Document File Format: reports the file format to which a document has been saved.

Convert Encoding…: [control is visible for plain text documents only] converts plain text files from one encoding scheme to another. Note that UTF-8 is considered the most modern encoding scheme and should be used by default.

Get Properties...: displays a sheet in which the user can enter information about the document. The information is saved with the document (rich text documents only). The contents of the Title, Author, and Subject fields are used for certain styles of headers and footers.