Re: Converting from Grandview to modern outlining wordprocessor

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1470

Posted by 100341.2151
2002-09-08 07:57:47

I took Steve’s advice and downloaded Inspiration v7 (about 20Mb).

As he says, this does a very good import of Grandview files. I used a large one (about 230kb), and it took an age to import it (and 20 mins on my P233 machine to draw an immensely complex diagram). But the text outline itself was - as far as I could see - a perfect reproduction of the original GV file.

The “export to .rtf” option gave a flawless export to Word 97 and enabled Word’s own outliner to be used. The ability to switch between Normal and Outline view is a very useful feature in Word (I have to admit) for any final tinkering.

The only problem for me was the slowness of scrolling in Inspiration. This may have been a function of either (or both) my relatively old pentium and the size and complexity of the outline. When writing articles I tend to use Grandview right up to the final draft stage so they do get to be rather large and baggy.

Despite this probem (but maybe only for those using older machines), it seems to provide a cleaner solution to the conversion problem (especially importing)than Notemap at this time. For pure text outlining, though, are there any reasons to prefer Notemap over Inspiration,I wonder? What do others think?

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in looking at the last version of ECCO - another Windows outliner - this now appears to be available as a free download. It, too, will import Grandview files well (including my 230k one), but has limited export facilities (no .rtf that I could see). For a copy, check the link from:

http://www.compusol.org/cs/ecco/

I’m pretty ignorant about all this, but it seems that the ability to export as an *.rtf file is the crucial factor. Word needs the formatting it provides in order to be able to show the imported outline both as normal text or as outline.

Derek

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