[oXygen-user] Outline view again

[Wendell Piez]

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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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez at mulberrytech.com
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