I need structure in my life…
I spent a lot of time yesterday evening trying to figure out the world of structured documents. I’m not sure if there is something obvious I’m missing here.
As started previously, my novel is a 700+ unstructured Word document. Right now, I just manually insert a page break before every new chapter and that’s about it.
But it seems all of the programs for structured documents are more about technical documents and presentations. I don’t need FrameMaker (which is good, because they stopped making it for Mac OS X), I don’t need the ability to move every paragraph/sentence like it is a single unit.
Ideally, I want to be able to see an outline view of the novel, broken into chapters. Almost like a PDF with the preview pane, but instead of individual pages, I want it to say Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc.
Does it need to happen for this novel? Not necessarily. But that would seem to help me mentally break the novel up. If I knew I’m working on chapter 5 today, just open it up, click on the Chapter 5 thumbnail and go.
Plus, and this is the real important part, while Chapter 5 is selected, if I hit home, I want it to go to the beginning of Chapter 5. If I hit end, I want the end of Chapter 5.
Anyone? Thoughts?
January 23rd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Jeff, here’s a recipe that shows how to do what you want using Mac Word.
First, go to one of your chapter boundaries in your text and type an appropriate title (eg, Chapter 1, Chapter 7, etc.)
Select that chapter title and run the Style dialog from the Format menu. Change the “List” dropdown setting to be “All styles”. from its original “List: Styles In Use” setting. This change will show you all of the styles that are builtin to Word.
In the much expanded alphabetical list of styles, scroll up to the “Heading 1” entry and select it. Then press the Apply button. This labels your selected chapter title as a level 1 heading of an outline. If you needed sub-chapters you could apply “Heading 2” thru “Heading 9” as appropriate to any sub-chapter headings you type. The style name you apply determines how the text that follows will be treated when you view your document as an outline.
All of the text of the novel you typed has been given the “Normal” style as a default style by Word, which ensures that it will be treated as the body text in the outline you are constructing.
After you have typed your Chapter headings and labeled them with the “Heading 1” style, run the Outline command on the View menu. This will display your document content in an Outline view, with your outline headings and body text properly indented and with dragtext handles visible in front of the first character of each paragraph.
Now go to the View menu and select the “Navigation Pane” option. A pane will open on the left side of your screen which will list all of your Chapter titles. If you click on any of those titles in the pane, your document will scroll in the main part of the window, to show you the beginning text of that chapter.
To see the last text of a chapter select the title of the following Chapter title in the navigation pane, click in the document pane, and scroll up to see the last text of the previous chapter, which you wanted to see.
I wrote the stylesheet code for Mac Word 3.0, where many of these features were first introduced in Word. I figured your situation with your novel was such a perfect example of the editing scenarios we were thinking about when we wrote that code 20 years ago, that you deserved this hint.
I came over to take a look at what you were doing because Dave Winer pointed to your testimony defending his right to be called a blog pioneer. I think you are right on the money.