-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi Wendell, Thanks for the suggestion. In fact, I've done that before to address this complaint and will probably do it again as a stop-gap measure, but as you point out, it doesn't quite meet the need. The user wants to be able to scan the nav pane, click on an item, and have the content pane sync up. I also have experience customizing the competitor of oXygen you mention. In that case, I had several css files for the structure view and used a macro/menu button to let the user toggle between them. It's one of the few areas where that tool has something on oXygen. You suggestion to add the ability to split the Author-view of the content window would be a nice thing to have for other reasons (e.g. to compare to sections of a document). In fact, you can already split the content pane in text view. However, I think that the current Outline view is already very close to doing everything it needs to do. In fact, it's more flexible than the competitor's structure view in that oXygen lets the user filter the list. That's not something you can do with SV. Thanks, David On 01/19/2012 01:35 PM, Wendell Piez wrote:
Dear David,
It's not the same as being able to configure the outline view (which is an intriguing idea), but one thing I have done is make a distinct CSS stylesheet just for a ToC rendition of the document. Of course this gives you all the flexibility of CSS including hiding things, and can be done right away. Switching between two or more CSS renditions is a feature oXygen has had for a while.
Additionally, in its CSS support, oXygen includes several extensions including a 'foldable' property that allows a user to expand and collapse arbitrary blocks of the document, while keeping certain element children visible. So you can collapse/expand sections while keeping their titles in view, for example.
Tailoring a user interface for the needs of users (each of whom is an individual with personal quirks and preferences) is certainly an art. At least one competitor to oXygen (which I haven't used in a while) allows the outline view to be styled with its own CSS. While this is good as far as it goes, it has a down side, in that it hides the straight unenhanced outline view, which is also nice to have. Maybe what we need is not more configuration of the outline view, but a way to view the same document with two (or more) different CSS stylesheets in different windows (along with, probably, the ability to harness their cursor positions together, or not).
Cheers, Wendell
On 1/19/2012 10:43 AM, David Cramer wrote:
Hi there, I think I've asked about the Outline view before and it seems to be getting more useful, but feedback from writers is that it's still exactly what they want.
When editing a document, it is useful to have a "table of contents" view of the document next to the main authoring view that provides a synoptic view of the document's organization. In oXygen, the Outline view comes very close to providing this:
Given a DocBook document if I filter on "chapter, section" then for the typical document, I see just the chapters and sections, but the results are a flat list. If I deselect "Flat presentation mode of the filtered results" then I have the indented tree view I expect BUT I also see elements, PIs, etc that are preceding siblings of the sections. For example:
* chapter Overview of the Foo Server * section Understanding the Foo Server Deployment * title Some section title * para Why am I seeing this para? * para This is noise and clutter ipsum lorem * section Foo Server Concepts
Is there a configuration change I could make to eliminate the preceding siblings of the section from the Outline view? If there's not, could the behaviors of the outline view be adjusted to allow for this use case?
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