Openoffice.org 1.1.2 as an outliner

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2191

Posted by jlarue
2004-09-10 19:25:35

Way back in 2002, somebody talked about trying to find an outlining mode in Openoffice.org. I just ran across an article that shows how to get there. It works with 1.1.2—I haven’t tried older versions.

The link is at http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7759
It’s called “The Rookery: OOo Off the Wall: The Outlining and the Ecstasy.”

On the one hand, its cumbersome. To really work the trick, you need three windows: a writer window, a paragraph styles window, and navigator.

On the other hand, once you set up your “headings” (which I set up to mimic MORE—heading one is bold, flush left: heading two is italicized and indented: heading three is normal text, indented further, and automatically defaults to heading three as “next style”) it works.

You use the headings to make the text. Then you call up Navigator, which offers an outline style view of the headings. From there you can expand or contract by level, promote, demote, move up and down.

Lots of limitations: no keyboard equivalents (that I’ve found, yet) for the headings. But shift and shift-tab work for promotion and demotion, ctrl-alt-arrow moves up and down. F5 toggles the navigator window.

I’m about to start work on a big book project, and had about resigned myself to even more cumbersome cut and paste between various Linux tools (the latest Tuxcards, mostly) to get the final “MS Word manuscript format.”

But I think with some tinkering, this might work—and since headings also control tables of contents and indexing, these tools might prove to be wonderful time savers.

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