Subject: Re: outlines vs. lists (was Re: Commit: Various Lists UI improvements.)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Feb 07 2001 - 12:36:34 CST
At 08:51 AM 2/7/01 -0500, Randy Kramer wrote:
>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.)
Good diagnosis. I've always been puzzled by Word's UI design choice here
(hardwired styles in outline view). The resulting outlines are almost
always plug-ugly.
The main value of outline view is the extra GUI widgetry for controlling
folding, so I'd guess that the only paragraph-level properties you really
want to override for this mode are:
- margin-left (so indenting looks right)
- align (again, so indenting looks right)
Otherwise, you *should* use the properties from customized styles, IMHO.
I'd have to play with it, but something like that could probably even be
default behavior, rather than a secondary option.
The less invasive outline mode is, the better.
Paul
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