Re: Tree widget for Table of Contents view?

Hi, Irene -

My main goal is interactive collapsing and expanding of each "branch" of the
hierarchical "tree" of headings. The Table of Contents view currently shows
an outline of the heading hierarchy, with all sub-headings always visible.

Selective hiding of sub-headings would allow the user to focus at different
levels of detail; this is especially useful for navigating large documents.
To accomplish this, I propose displaying the heading hierarchy in a tree
widget, like those used in GUI file managers. 

Specifically, a small icon is displayed to the left of each heading: a "+"
indicates the presence of one or more hidden sub-headings; or a "-"
indicates that any children are already visible, or that no children exist.
The user can toggle between the collapsed and expanded states for a heading
by clicking on each icon, or via a keystroke.

Editing is a secondary issue: when sub-nodes are hidden, I'd like the
ability to prune and graft the entire branch to another location, via
cut-and-paste. Ideally, the tree widget itself should have hooks to support
this capability. 

Assuming that such a tree widget is currently unavailable for Thot, I
propose to port an existing widget from an open-source library such as GTK.
Then I would populate the widget with the headings which are currently
displayed in Table of Contents view. Perhaps I should refer to the result as
an Interactive Outline View.

Does this sound feasible?


At 02:22 PM 1/25/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>The Table of Contents view is already editable today.
>So I don't understand what you plan to do exactly.
>Irene.


Thanks,
Marc

Received on Tuesday, 25 January 2000 16:39:12 UTC