How a topicmap element is displayed in TMNav depends mainly on two objects, the Abstractor and the Renderer. In short terms, the Abstractor defines what elements and relationships of a given topicmap element gets displayed, while the Renderer decides how theese elements are presented. The definition of Renderers and Abstractors as well as how they collaborate is in the scope of the panckoucke library, another subproject of tm4j. To learn more, see the panckoucke-docs.

In this quick tour, you did already see three different Renderers in action. The TreeRenderer and the HypergraphRenderer display arbitrary topic map elements, and the IndexRenderer displays various indexes of the current topicmap.

To change the Renderer being used, right-click in either the TreeView or in the HypergraphView and select from the popupmenu Use Renderer ->

Choosing a Renderer

After you switched from the HypergraphRenderer to the SectionRenderer, the presentation of the topic The TM4J Project looks like this:

The SectionRenderer