Merged 1-pane and 2-pane outlining for writers

Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Mar 17, 2008 at 03:15 AM

In 2-pane outliners, as the focus is moved from item to item, the HTML/RTF pane is updated to show the content specific to each item.

When used as a typical 2-pane outliner, SQLNotes behaves this way too. To view the content of multiple items, you need to do an HTML export.

There was a discussion here a few months back on implementing some of GV features into SQLNotes. As I’m not much of a writer, but I know there are writers here, I’d like to see if the following is interesting:

The idea is to show in the HTML editing pane, the HTML of all items displayed in the grid. Item expand/collapse would expand/collapse the HTML content. As the user would scroll in the HTML pane, the corresponding item in the outliner would be highlighted. HTML backcolor could be made to match the item backcolor to facilitate navigation.

So if the outline is:
+ My First Book
+ Chapter 1
Introduction
+ Chapter 2
...

When all items are shown, then the whole content would be displayed. As you would expand / collapse items, the HTML pane would reflect this and you’d be able to concentrate on specific sections.

SQLNotes can view items separate from the context (what others call Hoisting, but it is implemented in a more general fashion in SQLNotes), you could therefore focus on separate sections easily.

Also, since items can be displayed in multiple pages (grids), with context in one, and without in the other, you can quickly switch between viewing the whole document to viewing a section.

This would give a very dynamic nature to the HTML editor, much more suitable to using it for writing. It would combine the 2 panes (outline and html) into an intelligent outliner.

Any comments / suggestions ?