Ask not what More can do for you ...

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 341

Posted by mpt26
1999-09-21 22:33:53

David Bolene wrote:

I want an outliner that:
...

A lot of the things you want can be done by More 3.1 already. So if you’re using a Mac, you’re in luck.

is very keyboard centric like MaxThink was so that it is efficiently navigable and editable without ‘mousing’. And the keyboard mapping is programmable. And, you can use the arrow keys to navigate down ‘into’ and back ‘out of’ an outline hierarchy, and ‘up’ and ‘down’ topics within a parent (like Max used to enable as well).

See the More 3.1 quick reference card, which has been converted to HTML by Nick Lowe (thanks Nick) at http://www.rhbnc.ac.uk/Classics/NJL/more3ref.html. You’ll find that More can be run almost entirely from the keyboard.

You can’t change the mappings, but there’s probably some obscure shareware Mac control panel somewhere which will translate one to another.

uses columns to enable ‘cross-sectional’ outline views like Ecco Pro but a ‘view’ is just another outline topic parent and not some other thing (like the hack ‘folder’ concept they had in Ecco). IOW, a topic can have multiple parentages and therefore multiple outline ‘views/perspectives’. And of course, children maintain positionality with respect to the parent.

If I understand you correctly, More can’t do this, but its cloning feature comes close—you can have several copies of the same sub-tree in different places, and use the `Go to Clone’ command to switch between clones (and therefore go to the other parents).

topics are ‘typed’. That is they can be text, a date, an image, an embedded OLE object, or…

The nice thing about the Mac is that it does most of this transparently. For example, I have More outlines saved with equations inserted in them—copied from DesignType’s Equation Editor (which comes with Word and with ClarisWorks) and pasted into the outline. Then later on, I can copy the equation from the outline and paste it back into Equation Editor for further editing. You can’t double-click to edit, but {Shift+Right, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+V} isn’t too cumbersome.

stores the outline in XML

Use Brad Pettit’s More to XML converter.

is platform independent and is accessed through a browser.

Golly, you’re demanding, aren’t you? More isn’t platform-independent, but JeraWorks is, apparently. As for being browsable, from what I’ve read about Internet Explorer 5, if you use More to XML to save your outline as XML, IE5 will show it as an expandable outline (like an Explorer folder view). Mozilla 5 will have a similar ability, IIRC.

can reference anything via a URL and merge that thing dynamically into the view or is a navigable reference (IOW, uses XML Links). a reference to another outline invokes the outline processor again within the browser.

Sorry, can’t help you there.

can easily export to a word processor AND BACK!

Save your More file in Text format. You’ll need to create a rule set which uses no bullets (otherwise the bullet characters will be saved with the file), and switch to this rule set just before you save as text (if I’m wrong about any of this, anybody, please correct me). In your word processor, you’ll have to do a find-and-replace to get rid of the tab characters.

As for importing back into the outliner ... I don’t think so, you’d lose all the word-processor-specific stuff (unless both the outliner and the WP used XML as their native formats, and were smart enough to leave each other’s extra formatting alone).

includes a spell checker

<shrug/> I don’t use spell-checkers—they make me complacent about a document’s correctness, but they never correct everything wrong with it.

Hope these help ...

—mpt

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