
Using the Reference Document
The reference document is basically displayed as a regular hex editor. Additionally, after selecting a grammar in the toolbar, the mapping results are displayed on the right side.
There are some things you should know about the hex editing window. It allows you to
- choose the display of the line offset on the left side via a contextual menu (hex, decimal, octal or line number)
- choose the display of the start, end and length of a selection via a contextual menu (hex, decimal or octal)
- select some bytes via mouse or keyboard like in a regular text editor
Please notice that there's a difference if you select bytes (on the left side) or text (on the right side). Synalyze It! copies multiple representations of the selection to the clipboard (text and data), but depending on where your main selection was (bytes or text), you get a hex representation of text using the current encoding. To get the alternative representation, press tab. The change's also reflected in the content column below the hex view.
If you edit existing files, the overwrite mode is default, for new files the insert mode, of course. Switch between insert and overwrite mode by pressing Cmd-I.
The full power of Synalyze It! is revealed only if you work with grammars. Grammars describe how a file is
constructed in all its details. After selecting a grammar in the toolbar, Synalyze It! maps the structures to
your file and displays the results both in the hex view and the results view on the right side.
Now you can even edit the file contents in the results view, all the details like little/big endian of numbers
or different text encodings are applied correctly when changing the file.
In Areas of the grammar where no structure or structure element was create already, you can enrich the grammar
using the contectual menu of the selection: