Re: "Outline View"

I just wanted to add my $0.02. I've re-ordered the following for my
convenience in responding...

On Friday 09 October 2009 11:19:25 pm Martina Heimann wrote:
> first of all I have to admit that this is in fact the first mailing
> list I have subscribed, and so I hope that I act in an appropriate
> manner.

You're doing fine! :-)

> What I personally did: I inserted a "Table of Contents" via the named
> function, saved my document as Html-File and then reopened that
> Html-File in Abiword. Hence, I was able to navigate in my document
> via the "Table of Contents".

Congratulations, a very clever solution!

> Even before I had written my question in the mailing list, I
experimented with "text folding". Indeed, that function hides text
within lists. But what I am searching for is rather what you
circumscribed as follows:
> > If you use a numbered
> > heading system you can
> > systematically hide text
> > that you're not interested
> > in this way and restore it
> > when you're ready.<
>
> Hence, I would be satisfied if I could apply "text folding" to a
> heading system. Unfortunately, that was accurately the task I failed
> to accomplish with "text folding". I placed the caret on a headline
> of level 2 and chose "hide below level 1" up to "hide below level 3".
> The only thing that happened was, that the single headline
> disappeared, not the text below that headline. Afterwards, I could
> not restore the headline in any way.

> As long as it works (^^), "text folding" is undoubtedly a very useful
> feature. Nevertheless, I would find it even more convenient, if you
> could edit the "Table of Contents", that one can create via the
> "Insert"-Menu, and create e.g. links.

As it happens, around the time I saw Martina's first post, I also saw
the article "7 Steps to Better Tables of Contents in OpenOffice.org
Writer" at:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/7-steps-better-tables-contents-openofficeorg-writer

I was going to suggest (horror of horrors) using OpenOffice as an
alternative to Abiword because it has a feature that is usable (to me)
as an alternative to collapsible outlining. It's called the Navigator
and you bring it up by pressing F5--it's basically a navigation window
that shows all the headings in a document, and lets you quickly
navigate to any one of them. It's not quite as good as collapsible
outlining, but I haven't really found anything better in the open
source world.

(Actually, looking at it today in oowriter version 2.4, it is closer to
collapsible outlining than I remembered.)

If you want to test it out, bring up the Styles and Formatting thingie
(by pressing F11) and apply some heading styles to some lines of your
text (these are paragraph styles--if you don't see them click on the
backward P button). Then bring up the Navigator with F5 and you should
find a plus next to the "Headings" line--click on that to start
expanding the outline.

> Martin wrote:
> > I would be very interested
> > to know how useful you find
> > this feature. I thought it
> > would be easier to use than
> > MSWord "outline mode" which I
> > never actually understood.<

Well, I shouldn't put words in Martina's mouth, but for anybody who's
used the collapsible outlining feature in MSWord, (or the feature I
just described in oowriter), Abiword's feature (what do you call
it--collapsible lists?) is nowhere near as useful.

Among other things:
   * Abiword's list feature works on lists within the document (not the
entire document)--the collapsible outlining feature works on the entire
document as long as you've included headings in your document, and
formatted them as Headings
   * From either the MSWord or oowriter feature, you can navigate
through the entire document quite easily
   * Again, from either the MSWord or oowriter feature, you can easily
(and automatically) create a table of contents.

And, it's really not hard to understand. When you write a paper, do you
use headings to structure the document? If so, you just do the same
thing in MSWord or oowriter, applying the appropriate Heading style to
each heading, and you are "in business".

Randy Kramer

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Received on Mon Oct 12 01:06:16 2009