[I7] Table of Contents

[Graham Nelson]

Dear Andrew,

This is really very good. I like it much, much better
than the previous navigation gadget. It feels right,
and indeed looks nice (I rather like the torn paper
effect, especially).

As always, I do have a few points to make:

(a) I agree with Adam: clicking the title ought to
go into the whole document.

(b) The buttons at the top of the panel bar need
tidying: if you like my suggestion about having
them left and right as

[[Contents]]  [[Text]]

then perhaps it is possible for whichever is now
showing to be emphasised in some way, to
make clear that they are a radio-button-like
either-one-or-the-other choice?

I think "Contents" is a better choice of name
for the TOC than "Headings", certainly.

(c) Clicking on the torn paper area currently
reopens the entire source, thus undoing the
tearing. There's a certain logic to that, but
I don't know - it has a rather drastic effect and
is not easily undone. Can I suggest, instead,
that clicking on the top tear does another
cute barrel animation, but vertically this time,
onto the source in the next heading up which
does not include the current one as a
subordinate? And similarly down. That way
one can easily retrace one's steps, and can
vertically step through through the whole
source text.

(d) On the TOC page, the slider isn't currently
friendly enough. I do strongly feel that the
five notches ought to agree with the five
heading levels - not the actual extant heading
tree in the source... And the explanatory
text would make a lot of difference. (I found
it slightly puzzling to use even though I
already knew what it did, somehow.)

It might perhaps be nice if the slider took
some more immediate effect - if you click,
drag, and hold it at some different notch,
nothing takes effect until you let go. That
makes it a little harder to get the visual
sense of what it is one is adjusting.

(e) Those thin lines running vertically to
group subheadings are an inspired idea.
But it looks asymmetrical that when there
is a final heading of size 2 - say - which is
followed by three subordinate headings
of size 3, no line is drawn down alongside
these, because there's no next heading
of size 2 - so nowhere to draw the line to.
That means there's no way to grab the
final bunch of headings, which is a
shame, but it also visually suggests that
the final bunch is different somehow,
and that isn't really true.

Perhaps such a final line could end in a
little hollow circle rather than a little filled
one?

(f) Resizing the project window doesn't resize
the Source, apparently; it gets left stranded.

(g) A new user will find the contents page of
a project without headings a bit bewildering:
it's just a completely empty area, with maybe
the title in the top corner. We need to display
a little placeholder text in this case, I think.
Perhaps:

(i) If there's no title, the TOC should be headed
"Untitled" in italic?

(ii) If there are no headings, the TOC should
display the text:

"Larger Inform projects are usually divided up with headings like  
'Chapter 2 - Into the Forest'. This page automatically displays those  
headings as a Table of Contents, but since there are no headings in  
this project yet, there is nothing to see."

   Graham

--
Graham Nelson