Interesting article for outliners

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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 16, 2013 at 01:36 PM

Here’s an article many of us outliners may find interesting:

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/520246/as-we-may-type/

Good quote from Dave Winer:

“I want a space that they can share,” Winer says, referring to the writers, designers, and programmers who he hopes will form a Fargo community; he talks respectfully about “outliner people.” “The people I really like,” he says, “are people who are aware of their own intellectual processes—those are the only people you can explain the benefits of outlining to. Normal people, even very intelligent normal people, don’t think in terms of wanting to buy a tool that helps them organize their intellectual work better.”

Steve Z.

Posted by Hugh
Oct 16, 2013 at 02:52 PM

Thanks Steve. Interesting piece.

Posted by 22111
Oct 16, 2013 at 03:34 PM

Interesting find from which I have another citation: “But with an outlining program, you don’t need a clumsy numbering system, because the computer does the bookkeeping for you.”

Well, if that was true. As has been discovered before, NO outliner, not one (or is there such an outliner, now?), is able to permit you to reference between items, no automatic numbering system, let alone a self-updating one, with your cross-references surviving moves or inserts, which means that any author of legal things, where it would be “(cf. Rn. 923)” either can NOT use an outliner (when in fact, WITH this functionality, this would be by far the very best tool for such work), or then, must do it together with his proper, “manual” cross-references.

Such a system would be rather easy to implement in an outliner, all the more so in a database-based one, but they don’t do it.

In fact, I devised my proper system, where I put special marks behind the item titles, to which I reference, half-automatted, meaning I have a key for “set reference” (when focus is in text) or “set as reference” (when focus is in tree), and with an automatted list of code numbers, but it’s almost impossible to have this updated, from such an “external” macro, within your outliner, which means that those code numbers will always stay as they are, meaning not in line with your text, but in line with when you set them, and it’s only after export that then, within a text file, another macro there will be able to replace all those aleatoric code (item) numbers with “final” “margin” numbers, from 1 to xxx, and any (also multiple) references to them: It’s just that within a text file (html since that “translates” best, and will not lose your formattings and such), replacing the first such occurence, be it #286 or #78, by @1, and the second one, be it #50 or be it #300, by @2, and so on, is easy, when doing a similar thing, by your outliner’s search-and-replace function, is a nightmare which will invariably cause chaos… and then, Ultra Recall - you won’t believe me - does not even have a global replace function your macro could trigger one by one.

But again, within an outliner, such functionality would be very easy, it’s just not available.

So, what Mr. Ford says, is unfortunately not true.

As for the citation above, why even smart people just don’t see the need to “outline”, I’ve explained this in another thread: It’s just that we “outliners” put the outline other people only do within their file system, and then within Word, to a finer-grained level, but leaving out the intermediate levels.

Which means, most people will have some sub-folders, with perhaps 40 files, from which 20 are Word files, with outlining by (overall) several hundred headings, when we leave out the sub-folders, and only have 5 sub-trees within a 10,000-items file, giving access (those 5 sub-headings I mean) to several hundred, more or less indented, sub-items.

Again and again, people who advocate that “outlining” is another, different paradigm/philosophy, are profoundly mistaken: other people just organize their item hierarchies with different tools.

But of course, such erroneous articles like the one in that very respectable MIT Technology Review, add to the perpetuation of that old misconception.

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