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Talk:Display an outline as a nested table: Difference between revisions

(Why tabulate a nest of key points and supporting points ?)
 
 
(7 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown)
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# Logically connected peers are visually driven further and further apart as subordinate elaboration expands, and cognitive work is required to reconnect the 'sentences' which they form when read together.
# The 'vertical' metaphor of *'''support*''' (evidence supporting claim, clarificationexample supporting referenceclarity etc etc) is replaced by a visually less direct horizontal convention, and, again, takes some cognitive work to reconstruct.
 
 
A potential *weakness* of tabular representations of argument/exposition structures is, of course, that some horizontal contiguities are more meaningful than others. One solution is to add more space at the margins where the edges of sub-trees meet, and another is to distinguish adjacent subtrees by color – hence the '''extra credit''' task of using color to reveal the borders between sub-trees.
 
In short, tabular representation can be very useful in:
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# the visual presentation of nested key points and supporting points (rather than sub-divided topics)
# and the teaching of argument structure.
 
 
(The current Perl6 color scheme rather helpfully shows that I failed to make this at all obvious or clear :-) Thank you ! [[User:Hout|Hout]] ([[User talk:Hout|talk]]) 04:36, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
 
===When an outline is more a forest than a tree===
 
The test sample here is an outline with only one top level root node – we can think of it as representing a single tree.
 
In practice, of course, an indented text outline will often have several top level (unindented) lines.
To put it another way, many outlines represent forests – lists of trees – rather than single trees (or can otherwise be thought of as a single tree with a hidden virtual root).
 
FWIW I've updated the Haskell, JavaScript and Functional Python versions here to allow for the forest case by writing out a series of (wiki) tables, one for each tree, separated by a couple of linefeeds.
[[User:Hout|Hout]] ([[User talk:Hout|talk]]) 15:19, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
 
For example, a forest outline – with several top-level nodes – like:
<pre>alpha
beta
gamma
delta
epsilon
zeta
eta
theta
iota</pre>
 
might be rendered by the following sequence of space-separated tree-tables:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|-
| style="background: #ffffe6; " colspan=2 | alpha
|-
| style="background: #ffebd2; " | beta
| style="background: #f0fff0; " | gamma
|}
 
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|-
| style="background: #ffffe6; " colspan=2 | delta
|-
| style="background: #ffebd2; " | epsilon
| style="background: #f0fff0; " | zeta
|}
 
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|-
| style="background: #ffffe6; " colspan=2 | eta
|-
| style="background: #ffebd2; " | theta
| style="background: #f0fff0; " | iota
|}
[[User:Hout|Hout]] ([[User talk:Hout|talk]]) 15:41, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
 
where the following (single root / tree):
 
<pre>top level
alpha
beta
gamma
delta
epsilon
zeta
eta
theta
iota</pre>
 
would have rendered as:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|-
| style="background: #ffffe6; " colspan=6 | top level
|-
| style="background: #ffebd2; " colspan=2 | alpha
| style="background: #f0fff0; " colspan=2 | delta
| style="background: #e6ffff; " colspan=2 | eta
|-
| style="background: #ffebd2; " | beta
| style="background: #ffebd2; " | gamma
| style="background: #f0fff0; " | epsilon
| style="background: #f0fff0; " | zeta
| style="background: #e6ffff; " | theta
| style="background: #e6ffff; " | iota
|}
[[User:Hout|Hout]] ([[User talk:Hout|talk]]) 15:49, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
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