Structure pane redesign

[david_francois_huynh@adobeforums.com]

Hello,

A while ago I posted a message asking if anyone knew of a cheap/free plugin for automatically numbering figures and references to them... I got a bunch of great replies and decided to write a script myself. My script relies on the XML tags (e.g. FigureCaption, FigureReference) that I put in a document to locate the figure captions and number them, and then locate the figure references and resolve them. This works quite well for my purpose (oh, it works for tables and citations, too).

<http://people.csail.mit.edu/people/dfhuynh/misc/captionReference.js>

But, now I need to work with the Structure pane more often and that pane is just not designed very well--it doesn't seem to scale for a large number of elements. So I decided to redesign the UI of that pane myself:

<http://people.csail.mit.edu/people/dfhuynh/misc/Structure%20pane.PNG>

I think this redesign makes better use of screenspace. The Copy and Paste commands from the context menu is convenient for making references to figures by just copying the name attributes. The Search and Replace feature allows renaming attribute values quickly.

Anyhow, I have no idea on how to implement this new design. So, my questions are:
1. Does anybody else need something like this?
2. Does anybody know how I can implement this (as a palette)?

Many thanks!

David

[pjredman@adobeforums.com]

David,

I agree that the structure view is not optimal for long documents. If you want to alter InDesign's GUI you will need to create a plug-in using the InDesign SDK. You might also consider posting a feature request related to this issue. I think Adobe is very open to suggestions on how to improve InDesign's XML features.

Phil Redman