[I7] Table of Contents

[Graham Nelson]

On 14 Jan 2008, at 23:33, Andrew Hunter wrote:
> I've now uploaded a revised version of the Inform application to <http://www.logicalshift.co.uk/etc/Inform-dev.zip 
> > that incorporates many of the changes suggested in this thread.

This is becoming a really elegant feature. I registered
with the MacHeist bundled shareware offer this evening,
and was struck by the amount of eye-candy that even
the meanest OS X applications throw about these days:
but the TOC uses animation as well as any of them,
because it so clearly communicates the spatial
relationship between the pieces of source text. We
slide up or down, we back in and out. All very nice,
and like Adam, I feel that this feature has crossed
over the threshold to the point where it now feels
"really implemented".

For those without Macs to hand, here's what we see:

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and clicking on the cute arrows does the up or
down to the next section trick.

I withdraw my previous suggestion that we should print the names
of the adjacent chunks above and below the tears: the arrows
are better. (I suppose they could always appear as tooltips if
the mouse hovers over the arrow buttons? But I don't think it's
really necessary.)

Correspondingly on the TOC side, we see:

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It's very nice: clean and solidly done. The bottom of this TOC
(it's from the reprehensible ROTA) demonstrates a couple
of edge cases, so to speak:


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There are two noteworthy things here:

(a) the drop-down selection line from Part II ends at the foot
of the TOC with no black dot of a subsequent section to
anchor it to, and

(b) there's no line down from Chapter Z to Chapter E.
Chapter Z has no sections, so there aren't multiple
headings to be selected.

I think both of these cases are handled correctly.

When there are no headings, the TOC now displays the placeholder
text nicely. But

(i) it appears at a random height in the panel, which is disconcerting
(sometimes in the middle, but not always, and I don't know why)
- it would be better to have it always up at the top of the panel,
heading the page so to speak. In particular, it looks very odd
now if there's a title but no headings in the source text, and
that's actually the most likely way a new user will see it, since
newly created projects have title but no headings.

(ii) the point size used for this placeholder text is a little too
small, I think. (Yes, it matches that used for headings, where in fact
I think the point size is right -- but there's no reason this  
placeholder
text has to match that.)

(iii) my remarks about height also apply to the text

"No headings are visible at this level. Drag the slider below to the
right to make the headings in your source code visible."

which appears on some positions of the slider. (A good idea, this,
but could we say "the source text" rather than "your source code"?)

   Graham

--
Graham Nelson