Cheap Outlines
A Set of Outlining Macros for Macro5 and EPOC Word

• What it Does
• What You Need
• What You Do
• Other Information

What they Do

I really, really miss the built-in outlines in Newton's Notepad. Particularly with limited screen space, it's nice to be able to hide irrelevant information. I wrote this set of outlining macros to make a cheap simulation of true outlines. By playing with styles, the cheap outliner can hide everything in a Word document except the headers. When you then expand the outline, the header with the cursor in it is kept in view. I understand the 5mx version of Word has something like this built-in.

There are three macros. One is outline setup.opo -- you run this once on a document to set up all the appropriate styles. You then create your document using the gallery styles in Word for the outline headings, and Normal and Bullet List styles for stuff you want hidden in the collapsed view. The outline hide.opo and outline show.opo macros will hide and reveal any text in Normal or Bullet List style.

What You Need

• An EPOC device.
• Macro5 by Pascal Nicolas.
• The Cheap Outlines package. It contains this documentation, the source (outline setup.opl, outline hide.opl, and outline show.opl) and object (outline setup.opo, outline hide.opo, and outline show.opo) files.
• Stuffit Expander to expand the package.

What You Do

• Place the .opl files in your macros directory.
• Assign a hotkeys to them using Macro5.
• Create a new Word document making sure all text is in Heading styles (if you want it to show in collapsed view) or Normal or Bullet List styles (if you want it hidden)
• Invoke outline setup.
• Whenever you want to collapse the outline, invoke outline hide.
• Whenever you want to expand the outline, invoke outline show.

Other Information

Sometime the entire document will vanish the first time you invoke outline hide. Don't panic! Invoke outline setup one more time (while the document is still invisible) and that should fix the problem.

If you have comments, problems, or suggestions, please feel free to email me. I'll answer as soon as I can.

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Date created: August 29, 1999
Last modified: September 8, 1999
Copyright © 1999 Ron Risley