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Statements in a Thinker document may be moved within the hierarchy, moved to another document, copied to other places in the same document, or copied to other documents or deleted. The movement, copying, or deletion of statements does not require that the entire structure to be moved, copied or deleted be visible on the screen as parts of the structure may be obscured by the selection of viewing specifications. It is the ability to manipulate whole structures of the document that make the hierarchical text such a powerful tool. The viewing specifications can be set to view the document in its outline form (set the number of lines for each displayed statement to 1) and the entire document can be restructured. Move and Copy and Delete options are available for individual statements, branches, and groups of statements or branches. In all cases a sequence of dialogs walks the user through the operation. Labels may be typed into many of these dialogs to designate a statement that is not visible on the screen. The statement may also be selected with the mouse if the Mark option is chosen. When these operation are started using the tools at the top of the window there is an accelerated mode that skips may of the dialogs. As long as the command key is held down, the next dialog is skipped and the default selection is made from that dialog (the highlighted selection). Practice with this mode improves the speed with which reorganizations are made. The structure manipulation commands can be initiated from the menus or from the tools at the top of the window and are described in the section of the manual that deals with the Reorg menu. In addition to the structure manipulation tools Branches can be dragged on the screen (scrolling the screen if necessary) using the drag bars displayed in the left margin of the screen. To move a Branch position the cursor over the corresponding drag bar and hold down the mouse button. Move the Branch holding down the mouse button until the Branch is in the correct place and then release the mouse button to drop the Branch at its new location. The cursor changes to a Down arrow when the Branch will be dropped immediately after the Statement (Branch) under the cursor. The cursor changes to a Right arrow when the Branch will be dropped one level below the Statement under the cursor. If the cursor is the closed hand, the Branch will be dropped back in its original position. Only when the drop point is a legal move destination is the cursor changed to a Down or Right arrow. The cursor must be positioned over the text of the drop point. Previous Next