Many edit DocBook books with XXE, and most certainly you want proper
ToC navigation for that. And it appears to me that what is missing for
that is mostly just some GUI-related rearrangements.
You may say you already have the Document structure view for ages. But
there are several problems with that:
- It just doesn't work very well for *navigation*, because when you
click on a title in the structure view and switch back to the normal
view, the title will be at the bottom of the view port, not on the
top of it. Sometimes it's not even visible, because its below the
bottom of the view port.
- It's kind of slow, I suppose because XXE has to re-calculate
this-and-that for each CSS switching.
- The out-of-the-box hotkey access (Alt+V 1 and Alt+V 2) is a bit too
complicated, especially as the numbers can change depending on what
kind of document you open.
What I do currently is maintaining two parallel views. Something like:
<windowLayout>
<center css="DocBook for Docgen" />
<bottom css="Document structure" size="0.001" />
</windowLayout>
This solves the speed issues, as both view is maintained in parallel.
Also, when I click on a title in the structure view, XXE tends to
position that to the middle of the view port in the normal view; still
not the top of it, but much better than the bottom of it.
But there is a problem with this too; you don't have space on the
screen to keep both views wide open, so the ToC view should be hidden
until you need it, and then after you clicked on the desired title it
should be hidden again. At the moment I resize it with mouse... Maybe
there is a command that I could use for this resizing (couldn't find
it so far), so I can write a macro for it and like. But even then,
having a relatively OK ToC navigation required customization. Apart
from the initial impression that it may makes (no proper ToC
navigation), I'm certain most customers will not add ToC navigation
with customization, so practically for most users there will not be
such feature in XXE.
How should it work out-of-the box? My quick idea is that XXE, at least
by default, should always maintain a hidden ToC view (for DocBook
anyway), and there should be a standard hotkey and an obvious button
(so evaluators/users find the feature) for invoking/hiding that. This
could be generalized, the navigation view feature: a view that is
always maintained but by default hidden, and shown/hidden with the
standardized ways (a hotkey and a button maybe).
--
Best regards,
Daniel Dekany
