Subject: Re: outlines vs. lists (was Re: Commit: Various Lists UI improvements.)
From: Randy Kramer (rhkramer@fast.net)
Date: Wed Feb 07 2001 - 07:51:09 CST
Since two of the views in MS Word were mentioned, I thought I'd mention
some of the others that exist (at least in Word97) -- in addition to
Normal and Page view, there are Outline, Master, and Online view. In
outline view, collapsible outlining is "enabled" and the outline can be
selectively collapsed, expanded, and edited.
BTW, I agree with Mike's comments -- outlining in page view is probably
not very useful. (And, normal view is the place I prefer to read and
edit, not page view. In normal view I don't worry about page breaks or
line breaks. (I also set the option "wrap text to window".) It makes
it much easier to deal with content. Occasionaly (sp?), I will switch
to page view to adjust page breaking around a table or something special
("normal" page breaking is handled automatically according to the
options you choose for widows, orphans, and "space before" and "space
after" the various paragraph styles).
(And, I too would like to see Normal view implemented in AbiWord.)
Outline view is extremely useful, but it is unfortunate that Word
displays the outline using special paragraph styles that are fixed (not
customizable), so the outline view doesn't look exactly like your
document will look with any custom styles you might have applied. (You
can give any style an attribute of Outline Heading (1 thru 9) and that
style, if applied to text, will make the text an outline heading at the
designated level. Restating what I said above, when you switch to
outline mode, you will not see the custom styles you may have created,
but only the fixed styles used in the outline view. This has an
advantage in that these styles are indented appropriately (each higher
level indented successively further to the right), but it has the
disadvantage of not looking exactly like your final document. It would
be nice to have a choice (when collapsible outlining is implemented,
certainly not before 1.0).
(Aside, if you've applied character styles (as opposed to paragraph
styles), things like fonts and font sizes, these are visible in outline
view.)
Based on it's name, Online view was probably intended to view Web pages,
but it is also useful for outline structured documents because it adds a
pane on the left hand side which shows the document outline and shows
the document itself, with the applied styles, on the left.
I forget the advantages of Master Document view (even though I have used
it). It looks and acts like Outline view in many respects, but I think
you can easily navigate between the Master and "sub-documents". (I
didn't take the time to find a sample Master document.)
I normally edit in Normal view, and switch to Outline view to view and
organize the structure of the document. I only became aware of the
Online view within the last two years, but it seems very useful. If I
was still using Word every day, I imagine that I would migrate towards
using that as my main view. When I've used Master documents, I've used
the Master view and it was helpful. (I'll remember what it was good for
tomorrow morning.)
Randy Kramer
Mike Nordell wrote:
>
> Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> >At 9:59 AM -0500 2/6/01, Randy Kramer wrote:
> >>Mike -- have you ever used a folding editor? Was it useful? If not,
> >>was it because the concept was not useful or because it wasn't, for
> >>example, integrated with an IDE?
> >>
> > I'm not Mike, but I use a folder editor pretty frequently,
> > and it's VERY useful for editing source code since I can close up
> > blocks that I'm not currently interested in to see more logic w/o
> > scrolling.
>
> This is my view of it also.
>
> > In an outliner, folding of "heads" is appropriate for the
> > same reasons - you want to see more of the context w/o scrolling. But
> > I don't think we need folding in AbiWord for 1.0 - though if we do
> > want to provide outliner functionality (either as a sectional element
> > or as an alternative view) we WILL need it at some point.
>
> I'll borrow two terms from M$ Word(7.0); "Page Layout View" and "Normal
> View".
>
> What AW currently only supports is the "Page Layout View" which is IMO just
> a quick version of print preview. It's useful when making the printed pages
> look good, but when editing reasonable amounts of text I think it only
> hurts. It becomes harder to browse, the cursor has to jump over page breaks
> and so on.
>
> That said, I've found the ability to fold sections to be useful in "Normal
> View", but in "Page Layout View" i _think_ it could be wrong. This view is
> to give a quick preview of how the printed pages will look. If folds were
> allowed in this view it no longer displays a print preview.
>
> The short version: I'd first like to see the "Normal View" type implemented.
> For that view folds would make sense.
>
> /Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Wed Feb 07 2001 - 07:54:52 CST