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Variable-level outlines? (of notebooks, in the notebooks themselves)

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg69249] Variable-level outlines? (of notebooks, in the notebooks themselves)
• From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
• Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 23:46:41 -0400 (EDT)
• Organization: Stanford University
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Two generic things I'd very much like to be able to do in working with a 
lengthy notebook, *right in the notebook itself*, are:

1)  Open or close all the cells in a notebook ranked above or below a 
given style, with the styles ranked in the same hierarchy as the "cmd-N" 
ordering in the Format >>Style menu, using a quick keyboard command (no 
selection, and no mousing, needed).

In other words, be able to view and navigate (and print) the notebook 
itself in a pseudo outline or Table of Contents form, with all cells 
from cmd-1 down to cmd-N open and all lower level cells closed. 

One can of course accomplish something like this using the AuthorTools 
>> MakeContents palette -- but only by creating a separate TOC file, 
which has to be examined and dealt with, and can't itself be used, for 
example, to copy some subsection in the notebook itself and paste it 
into a new location.

The user interface I'd visualize might be that cmd - ' would not just 
toggle open and closed a selected group but rather open *all* the cells 
in the notebook below a certain hierarchical style level, increasing by 
one level per tap (and decreasing one level per tap for each cmd - 
option ').

Maybe I can gin up a palette with a button to do this . . . or maybe 
someone else already has?

2)  More generically, I'd like to know how to create a palette that 
would use NotebookFind[] to add or remove or change one or more specific 
options in all the cells in a given notebook that are of a specific 
style and contain a specific content.

As one use for this, I could insert cells of a certain header level that 
say "***** Page Break *****" at selected points in a long notebook, 
leaving them open but otherwise inactive, just so I'd know they were 
there.  Then a button click could (a) insert PageBreakBelow->True into 
each of these cells, and (b) close the cell, so it wouldn't clutter up 
the printout.

Maybe I'll try my (limited!) skills at a palette or package for that 
also.