I was just wondering if the developers would be interested in something that might be considered an easy fix for the outlining problem in Writer? This is something that remains one of the top bug reports & feature requests in the OOo and Libre Office forums/lists, for over 20 years with OOo. I came across a way to hide/unhide elements or whatever in an HTML document. It uses a javascript script embedded in your HTML document, in the “< head >” block, only 11 lines of javascript as a function.
Then you have 2 ‘snippets’ that you add to your elements, one acts as a ‘parent’ string in the element that will always be visible in the HTML document, the other acts as a ‘child’ string in the element that you want to hide/unhide in the document. The ‘parent’ string makes the element text, say the text in a List Item clickable. When you click on it it hides or unhides the element with the text in it.
For example, you put the ‘parent’ string in your List Item in a list. Then you put the ‘child’ string in a Span under that, say description text or an explanation of something or whatever in the Span. By default, when you open the document, all the child elements are hidden, and you have to click on the parent elements to ‘drill down’ to what you’re looking for.
With a little creative thinking you can do all kinds of things with it. Want to hide sub-lists? Put them in a Div, with the ‘child’ string in the Div and the ‘parent’ string in the List Item of the Parent List the Sub-list belongs to. Voila, you have a hidden sub-list. And when you click on the text of the ‘Parent List Item’, it hides/unhides the sub-list.
Now I know Libre Office isn’t written in Javascript. And I don’t know how hard it would be to incorporate it in the code, and they might consider it a security risk or whatever.
But surely it wouldn’t be too hard to take this code and convert it to whatever language LO is written in, and make them modules or methods or functions or whatever you would use, and incorporate them into the LO Writer code. You already have the hidden text function you can use, with a bunch of steps, and make hidden text and lists that way. So, couldn’t that be replaced by this, or this added as another function? Hopefully, and I don’t see why it couldn’t be, added in a way where you can just point and click.
Just a suggestion.