Thank you for including having the Table of Contents inspector work with RTF docs. Love it. This will be a time saver! Of course, you do all this work, and I immediately have a suggestion. (Sorry!)
TOC lists all sentences that are fulled bolded or underlined. It would be nice to have a preference to specify if those styles represented headings or subheadings, and then have the inspector show this difference. For example, putting some linespace above a heading to separate it, and making the subheadings italicized or indented.
Thanks for the suggestion! It’s not yet clear how popular this feature will be and how many users actually use it, version 3.0.2 has just been released
I’m working with a very long RTF document, and the Table of Contents tab in the Inspector is being a huge help. But it made me revisit this idea. I have some small ideas of how to make the ToC feature more useful:
Right now, the ToC adds any line that is fully bolded or fully underlined. But I think the ToC could use one more level of organization. I propose that lines that are fully all-caps be added, so we’d have three levels of headings: all-caps (H1), bold (H2), and underlined (H3).
Then in the inspector, I suggest the different heading are shown differently. Right now, all lines in the ToC are bold which make long documents with lots of headings difficult to work with. So I suggest the ToC show the different headings differently: H1 (all-capped lines) in all-caps and bolded, H2 (bolded lines) as bold, and H3 (underlined lines) as plain text.
I would also suggest adding line space above the H1s, to help make the ToC easier to scan.
In my opinion, that’s just a crude heuristic. An all bold line could also be a warning, and an all italic one an image capture. (AND ALL UPPERCASE IS JUST DIFFICULT TO READ. Looks as if sometime were shooting.)
Why not use a format that provides semantics like MD or HTML? Even Word and Numbers are able to produce ToCs based on styles, not formatting alone.
I just noticed that if an RTF has a bold line (a heading) followed by underlined lines (subheadings), the TOC panel shows the subheadings in a collapsible outline! Love it!
Just curious, could you explain the logic that is used? I have some subheadings (it looks like ones that have multiple styles: like underline + strikethrough*) that aren’t automatically getting “outlined”, so I wanted to see how to clean them up to make them work.
Thank you!
*When I am planning a project, I often write out multiple ideas, each under a subhead. Then when I make a choice, I keep the old ideas but strikethrough their subheads.
I’m such a poor Devonthink scholar. I not only totally overlooked the TOC in Markdown/RTF files, I missed something really cool.
Imagine writing a Markdown note. You use hashtag headers for organization and because it makes that spiffy TOC navigation menu in the sidebar.
You want to footnote your musings with a few other Markdown documents in your DT database, so you transclude them in at the bottom.
Any headings in the transcluded document appear in the TOC for the encapsulating document and the transclusion, when viewed in edit mode, is a working link back to the source. Starting every document with a header, either with a template or via something like Keyboard Maestro, helps, too.
However, our preferences are pretty loaded up as it is.