Montage supports a variety of internal program components for viewing, editing, and exploring certain types of data.  These built-in viewers operate in interior (child) windows contained within the Montage Desktop window.  Unlike external applications, which are independent programs that run under separate processes in exterior (top-level) windows, built-in viewers are integral to Montage itself (i.e. they are part of the program, MONTAGE3.EXE).  Montage Shortcuts can be associated with either external applications or internal viewers, and the Shortcut Properties dialog is supported in either case.

Features supporting built-in viewers are disabled by default, and the related documentation is sparse, because this area of Montage is still under development, and drastic revisions are anticipated.  (See INFO: issues regarding the current implementation of Montage's built-in viewers for further details.)  To use these facilities, you should check the Advanced, Built-in Viewers option of the Montage Options context menu.  Note that a number of menu options, such as the main Format menu, are present only when built-in viewers have been enabled.  To create an internal Shortcut to a viewer, use the Window, Create Shortcut command.  The following types of viewers exist, but only the Image viewer and Text editing viewer currently are usable by non-developers.

Image viewer: displays common graphic file formats.

This viewer is functional, but its context menu commands and options need a major overhaul.  It includes a nifty mouse wheel capability for scrolling and panning (Alt + MouseWheel), and Ctrl + MouseWheel to zoom in and out.  Supported image file formats for this viewer include ANI, BMP, CUR, DIB, GIF, ICO, and JPG.  A couple of image stretching options also are provided in the Format menu.

Nested Desktop viewer: opens a montage within an interior window.

Using Microsoft's arcane "Active Document" feature, this viewer supports a way of physically nesting Montage Desktop windows, i.e. opening a montage within a child window of a parent Montage Desktop window.  Since Microsoft is discontinuing its support of Active Documents, this viewer is pretty much dead in the water, but we've retained it for further study and comparison with alternative approaches.  Additional runtime setup steps (not documented) are required to use this feature, so its presence is just a residue of development and testing.

Text Editor viewer: displays and edits plain ASCII text files.

This viewer is moderately useful, but somewhat unpolished and incomplete in its present implementation.  It is handy for managing lots of small text files, e.g. notes, task lists, logs, etc.  Note the support of Ctrl + MouseWheel for quickly increasing or decreasing font size, as well as font-related commands in the Format menu.

Web Browser viewer: explores the Internet or your machine's local filing system.

This uses Microsoft's WebBrowser ActiveX control (closely related to Internet Explorer), which entails additional runtime setup requirements (not yet documented).  Currently this viewer is purely experimental, for development and testing purposes.

Open With... dialog

In conjunction with Montage's built-in viewers, there is a dialog used to open a given file with a specified type of viewer.  (This dialog also is preliminary, but usable.)  When the Advanced, Built-in Viewers option has been turned ON, you can access the Open With... dialog either through the File, Open With... command, or the Open With... command of the Desktop context menu.