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Collapse and Expand

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To collapse a topic is to hide its family (its daughters, and their daughters, and so on). A collapsed topic appears to have no daughters, except that its triangle, though right-facing, is filled, to indicate that it does have daughters but is currently collapsed.

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To collapse a topic, do one of the following:

To expand a collapsed topic, do one of the following:

The menu commands mentioned above (Topic > Collapse Topic, Topic > Expand Topic) can be reduced to a single menu item in the Topic menu through a preference. These commands are available also through the contextual menu that appears when you Control-click on a topic’s triangle.

Collapsing and the selection

A topic that is hidden by collapsing is never selected. If a topic was selected (as part of a multiple selection) and you then collapse an ancestress of that topic, the topic is no longer selected. This behavior is part of a general policy where Opal guarantees that a topic is never selected without your being able to see that this is so, right in the document window. Thus, when you perform an operation, such as applying formatting to selected topics, the operation is never applied to topics that you had no way of knowing were part of the selection.

Conversely, Opal will sometimes automatically expand a collapsed topic for you in order to select it. For example, if you select a topic and choose Edit > Select > All, the entire outline is expanded automatically; that’s because you can’t select all topics if all topics are not visible. Or, if you select a collapsed topic and choose Topic > New Daughter, Opal expands the topic, since you can’t edit a daughter topic that’s hidden. Similarly, performing a find may require Opal to expand topics in order to select an occurrence of the found text.

Collapsing and expanding multiple levels

When you collapse a topic, Opal remembers the collapsed or expanded state of every one of its daughters, and every one of their daughters, and so on. That way, when you expand the topic again, the whole family becomes visible looking just like it did at the time you collapsed it.

But perhaps that isn’t what you want. You might like to reduce clutter and increase clarity by expanding just one level at a time. You could solve this by expanding the topic and then manually collapsing all its daughters, but Opal gives you a better way. When you collapse a topic, you can collapse every member of its family as well (each of its daughters, and each of their daughters, and so on). This is called Collapse Family. When you later expand the topic, you will see only its daughters — they are still collapsed, so you won’t see any of their daughters.

The illustrations below show a topic fully expanded, and the same topic after Collapse Family followed by Expand.

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To collapse a topic and its family, do one of the following:

Similarly, there is a single move for expanding fully a topic, its daughters, their daughters, and so on, so that the topic’s entire family becomes visible. This is called Expand Family. To expand a topic and its family, do one of the following:

Finally, you can expand or collapse the entire outline at once (regardless of what is selected). To do so, choose Topic > Collapse All or Topic > Expand All.



 
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