Opal offers you a view of your outline where just one topic is visible, along with its family. So, you see the topic, and can see its daughters, and their daughters, and so on; but you can’t see the topic’s sisters, or any topics further up the hierarchy. Such a view is called a focused view, and the single topic that is visible along with its family is the focused topic.
Focused view is indicated by the word “Focused” appearing in the document window’s status bar. And the focused topic is displayed in a special way: instead of a triangle, it has a circle, which is filled if the topic has daughters, and empty if not.
To focus on a topic:
Once you are in focused view, you can focus further — that is, you can select a topic within the focused view and choose View > Focus again. Thus, you can have levels of focus.
To leave focused view, do one of the following:
Choose View > Unfocus. If you originally focused and then focused further, this pops you up one level of focus — you will return to the previous focused view.
Choose View > Unfocus All. This causes you to leave focused view absolutely, right now, regardless of how many levels of focus there are.
When you’re in focused view, some commands are disabled or work differently because to create a new topic at the same level as the focused topic (or higher) would violate the meaning of focused view. Thus, for example, you can’t select the focused topic and choose Topic > New Sister. And when you select the focused topic and choose Edit > Paste Topics, the pasted topic becomes the focused topic’s first daughter, rather than its next sister as would usually be the case.