Display less detail in the Outline view

[dcramer]

Hi there,
Is there anyway to suppress certain elements in the outline view to reduce the amount of noise? For example, I might like to suppress all <indexterm> and <para> elements.

It would also be nice to flatten out xincluded content so you see only the xincluded thing and not two additional levels of hierarchy (a node for the include element, then one with the name of the file, then the actual content).

Thanks,
David

[Radu]

Hi David,

In the Docbook ro.sync.ecss.extensions.api.ExtensionsBundle implementation you can overwrite the method:
createAuthorOutlineCustomizer()

which should allow you to ignore certain AuthorNodes from appearing in the Outline. But you cannot ignore just a level in the tree so ignoring a node will ignore its entire sub-tree.

Regards,
Radu

[dcramer]

Ok, thanks. I'll look into that one of these days. In the mean time, I've come up with a solution that is closer to what my users really want. I've added another css file to the list of alternative csses.

Now in the main wrapper document that xincludes all chapters etc, I switch to that css (pasted below) which displays only the toc outline structure.

What I did is quick and dirty, but at least provides a synoptic view of the entire document, which is what you really need. So now my feature request is that this css-driven synoptic view be available in a pane like the outline view (i.e. to the side of the Editor windows and visible at the same time as they are without tiling the editor windows.

Thanks,
David

Code: Select all

import "folds.css";

@import "links.css";



@namespace oxy url('http://www.oxygenxml.com/extensions/author');

@namespace xi "http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";



xi|include:before {

    content:"" !important;

}



xi|include{

    display:inline !important;

}



oxy|processing-instruction {

    display:none !important;

}



oxy|reference:before {

  content: "" !important;

}



oxy|reference{

    display: inline !important;

}



oxy|comment {

    display:none !important;

}





* {

	white-space: nowrap;

	text-align: left;

	font-family: "Arial";

	font-style: normal;

	font-weight: bold;

	color: black;

	margin-left: 10px;

	display: none;

}





info{

display: inline;

}



info>title, info>title *, title, title *, glossterm, glossterm *, question * {

	display: inline;

}





book, part, chapter, share_chapter, article, section, share_section, simplesect, share_simplesect, glossary, preface, reference, appendix,share_appendix, share_procedure, glossentry, glossdiv, glossentry, qandaset, qandaentry, question {

	display: block;

}



procedure>title, procedure>info>title, procedure>info>title *, procedure>title *{

   color: green;

}



chapter>info>title, part>info>title, appendix>info>title, chapter>title, part>title, appendix>title

{

	color:#00589E;

}

	

chapter>info>title *, part>info>title *, appendix>info>title *, chapter>title *, part>title *, appendix>title *

{

		color:#00589E;

		display: inline;

	

	}

	

simplesect>title *, section>info>title *, section>title * {

		display: inline;

}

[dcramer]

Ok, I just figured out that if I switch the wrapper doc to my new toc view, then tile the windows, I can drag them around and put the toc view on the left and stack the others on the right and get what I want.

David

[Radu]

Hi David,

Interesting idea, as long as you are not doing any editing in the main XML document you can use it as a TOC.

Regards,
Radu

[dcramer]

Yes, it works ok, but requires a little creativity and is not as easy to explain to new writers as I would like. I think there's still a feature request/unsatisfied user story lurking in here. The current Outline View is of limited value for a number of reasons:

• you can't limit what is displayed to just chapter and section titles or whatever
• if you view a document that xincludes chapters or sections, it adds extra levels to the hierarchy
• you can't view the outline of the whole document while looking at the content of an included file in the main pane (as soon as you switch to the included file, the outline view switches to the view of that document).

People using xinclude to assemble pieces into a larger doc need an outline view of the assembled document. For this view,

• The framework implementer needs to control what is presented in the outline (either through css or I could imagine an editor using xslt to generate the outline).
• The nodes should be collapsible (collapse/expand all would be nice).
• When the user clicks (or at least control clicks) on a node in the outline, he should be taken to that file (i.e. the included file, not the including file).
• The ability to filter nodes (like the current Outline View has) is handy and would be a nice to have.

The lack of a good synoptic outline view is the biggest (and perhaps only real) limitation that Oxygen has as an editor for files assembled using xinclude.

I know there's also an assembly mechanism being proposed for DocBook which would be an alternative to xinclude and so avoid this problem (if it were supported), however I don't know what its status is. As long as users are using xinclude to assemble pieces into larger documents, this is a limitation.

Thanks,
David

[Radu]

Hi David,

Thanks for the feature request.
We'll consider it for a future version.

Regards,
Radu