Hiding and Formatting Auto-titles

Feature requests, and in-depth discussions of features and the way Mellel works

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Hiding Auto-Titles (Improved Oultine Formatting)

This would make my (writing) life much better!
4
33%
Sure, I'd like to see this.
5
42%
Don't waste your time.
3
25%
 
Total votes: 12

Pointyhead
Got the styles thing figured out
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Jun 24, 2006 9:24 pm

Hiding and Formatting Auto-titles

Post by Pointyhead »

After several months of using Mellel, I have one substantial problem with it. I like Mellel's outlining/auto-title function; it's one of the main reasons I switched to Mellel. But, for most of my writing, the final draft needs to be text-only, i.e. have no headings. With the current implementation I have to go through and manually delete all the auto-titles; a work-around suggested elsewhere (though clever) is unacceptable because the final product cannot have the blank lines it would leave. Thus, I need to have the ability to hide auto-titles, so that they completely disappear from the document.

Though it would not be optimal, I would be satisfied with the ability to do this through formating auto-titles: if one could have a different format for the outline, and make the format for the document blank. Currently, this leads to a "#" in the auto-title location, and, again, creates an otherwise blank line.

Along with eliminating this 'blank line' issue, I'd also like the ability to put auto-titles inside paragraphs, i.e. not force a carriage return to precede or begin an auto-title.

Finally, the ability to display / print only the auto-titles, i.e. an outline of the document, would be very handy as well.
zoul
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Post by zoul »

I have created a simple Mellel outliner you can use until something like that gets implemented. You could also vote on the Export system feature request, because that would also bring the outliner into Mellel.
Mart°n
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Location: Germany

Post by Mart°n »

zoul wrote:I have created a simple Mellel outliner you can use until something like that gets implemented.
While I appreciate your work, I think Pointyhead would rather output the text between the auto-titles and get rid of the outlines instead of exporting them (if I understood him right).

Apart from this, the first sentence “Here you can a tool for dumping outlines” on your website is somewhat confusing and I think the word “download” should be inserted between word 3 and 4.
zoul
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Post by zoul »

Mart°n wrote:While I appreciate your work, I think Pointyhead would rather output the text between the auto-titles and get rid of the outlines instead of exporting them (if I understood him right).
I should have quoted, I was replying to the last sentence of the post. But the export system ad applies to the autotitle filter too, because writing an autotitle filter would be a trivial thing.
Mart°n wrote:Apart from this, the first sentence “Here you can a tool for dumping outlines” on your website is somewhat confusing and I think the word “download” should be inserted between word 3 and 4.
There would be no fun on the web if I occasionally didn’t out a verb or two. [I’ll fix that, thanks!]
Mart°n
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Location: Germany

Post by Mart°n »

zoul wrote: I should have quoted, I was replying to the last sentence of the post.
Hmmm… something I definitely have overlooked. 8) I will read the post more careful next time.
lbas
Read the guide!
Posts: 42
Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2005 2:56 am
Location: Asia

Post by lbas »

Haven't tried this directly with Auto-Titles but it's sound. The idea has been used for a long time.

Workaround for eliminating autotitles from the text when they are no longer needed. Plan the autotitle to be different from anything that might possibly be found in the text. Ex., old, old docs typed in would often have the page number prefaced by "#&" or somesuch, so a search/find on that string would return the location of each and every page number, and nothing else.

My Perlish thinking tells me that our friends the developers probably gave us a way to build a find expression that says, find every string that begins with a "#&" and ends with (maybe "&#", I don't know what would work for you). Then replace that found string and the following hard return with nothing.

Nice too if all the found strings could end up on the clipboard or in a new file for us to use that way too.

My mind can see this in Perl pretty clearly but I don't yet know the implementation of find in Mellel well enough to say how easily this will translate. I've used the above logic to work in a number of different apps successfully so I expect it to work here for us too. Just have to get the details.

If the hard return included at the end of the autotitle is "findable" then it is the logical ending character for the search expression.

Woodson
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