Show and Hide Text Feature

[johnblommers]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When making an edit pass over a manuscript I sometimes come across a chunk of text that I want to remove. But it's text that I might want to put back or use again later on. How can this text be maintained available and yet not have it show up in the manuscript?

novelWriter already includes a comment feature so the writer can sprinkle the text with ideas and notes. But the text I want to hide is not a comment. It might be a description.

Describe the solution you'd like

I propose novelWriter include special markers, perhaps backtics: \hide this text. A user controlled switch will:

• reveal all hidden text but change its color so it's obvious
• hide all hidden text (to display the manuscript as it will be exported)
• search inside only the hidden text (so the writer can find it again)
• don't include hidden text in the exported manuscript (default)
• do include hidden text in the exported manuscript (not sure how this is helpful)

Describe alternatives you've considered

This sort of thing may be possible if novelWriter were to include Git integration. There is a feature request to add Git integration that might be pressed into service to accomplish the above. However the above seems so much more useful.

Additional context

None.

[vkbo]

It seems this is at least technically possible as QTextBlock has a setVisible method that, presumably, can be used to show/hide lines of text (should be easy enough to test). I would guess the feature is supported because this is a common feature of code editors, and Qt has multiple widgets clearly intended for such use.

The other feature points are easy enough to implement too, and are sensible options to have.

The remaining question is how to mark a line as one that can be hidden. Since the intention here seems to be to "comment out" text, this should be a sub class of comments, similar to how synopsis comments are tagged. This will also help to reduce complexity and slowing down of the text parsing by adding further top level branching (headers, keywords, comments and regular text are treated as separate code branches at the top level in both the highlighter and the tokenizer).

One possible solution is to have a paragraph like this tagged with:

%hidden: The text paragraph that is hidden.

For simplicity, a keyboard shortcut could be added to quickly toggle this feature on and off for a line.

[vkbo]

I've been thinking about this a bit. What you essentially want is a way to strike a whole paragraph. Maybe a %strike: tag would work too as the marker for such a paragraph.

I want to keep the the syntax as consistent as possible to avoid the need to learn a lot of esoteric codes and keywords.

[johnblommers]

Hiding an entire paragraph is one of the use cases I'm thinking about, indeed it is likely the most common use case. But I'm also thinking to hide entire sentences, and perhaps even a few words or phrases in the general case. I may want to \hide this text\ only. \Or this entire sentence needs to go. \.

[vkbo]

I will have to experiment with this. The backslash is not ideal as it's used for escaping characters, so unsure how to make this happen within text lines (paragraphs). Hiding whole lines is, as I said, trivial as each line, by default is a QTextBblock, which has a visibility flag.

[johnblommers]

Maybe something like <hidden>Bla bla bla </hidden> or %hiddenBla bla bla %.

[vkbo]

I think I will close this issue now. I've implemented #1075, which allows a paragraph to be completely ignored in the document viewer and manuscript builds. It is not visually hidden in the editor though, but that's a trickier thing to achieve. It may also not be so desirable as it would otherwise be difficult to find the hidden text. I've tested hiding these paragraphs, but there is no visual indicator to show where they are.

The ignored paragraph feature is a toggle feature, and can be used on multiple paragraphs. It will be a part of the upcoming 2.3 release, and can be tested in the 2.3 pre-releases. The syntax is similar to comments, but uses a %~ prefix instead. They cannot be enabled in manuscripts. I agree with your point that this makes little sense.