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Anatomy of a Document Window

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This is a description of the parts of an Opal document window.

samplewindowlabelled picture 1. Toolbar
2. Search field
3. Topics
4. View magnification popup
5. Status bar

Toolbar

The Opal document window toolbar is a standard Mac OS X toolbar, which means that you can perform the usual operations on it:

The toolbar settings for one document window apply to all document windows, until you change them again.

Search field

The Search field is used to implement the Edit > Find > Search command. By typing in the Search field, you can filter your view of a document so that only topics containing your specified text are shown.

Topics and their “triangles”

The editable document area displays the topics of your outline. Topics are marked with a symbol at the left side. (This symbol is called the topic’s triangle throughout this documentation, even though sometimes it isn’t a triangle.) These symbols reflect the state of the outline and whether or not the topic has daughters:

right-facing empty triangle triangleEmpty picture topic without daughters
right-facing filled triangle triangle picture topic with daughters, collapsed
down-facing triangle triangleDown picture topic with daughters, expanded
grey triangle triangle50 picture topic in filtered view
empty circle focusedEmpty picture focused topic without daughters
filled circle focused picture focused topic with daughters
empty square ancestressEmpty picture single ancestress without daughters
filled square ancestress picture single ancestress with daughters

View magnification popup

The popup menu at the lower left of the window changes the magnification of the outline display. This is not the same as merely changing the font size. With view magnification, everything in the content area is enlarged or reduced — the size of the text, the size of the triangles, the size of pictures — as if you were moving your face closer to the screen or further away from it.

You can achieve the same effect by choosing from the View > Zoom menu.

Status bar

The status bar displays messages about what’s being displayed in the document window. Normally it shows how many topics your outline contains. But it also informs you whether you are viewing the outline in a focused or filtered way, by prefixing the word “Filtered” or “Focused” before the number of topics; and in that case, the number of topics is the number of topics in the filtered or focused view, not the number of topics in the outline as a whole.