On to Styles

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 4938

Posted by crcowan
2006-01-06 18:37:22

Everyone,

Ok,you have now teased me out of lurking. I’ve followed this site for ages having been completely OC (Obsessive / Compulsive) about outliners and personal knowledge management for years, using everything (and, unfortunately usually buying) and building my own.

But you have succeeded in pulling me in because of a word processing topic. Who would have thought? Anyway, the reason for my post is to try and stimulate a discussion on styles in word processing and outliners. I started in the good old days of IBM’s SCRIPT and the father of SGML, HTML and XML called GML - Generalized Markup Language. What I really liked was that you marked up WHAT something is (a paragraph, an ordered list, a heading ... gee, HTML)not how it should look. Then it is up to the computer to lay it out attractively. And, of course, a change in the style definitions changes everything rather than a tedious task of hand updates.

I know Word and other processors can handle styles but they make it obscure, difficult, worst of all they give the (naive)user an opportunity to really mess things up. They really don’t encourage style use. I envision a WP that is very easy to use and very easy to tag with styles. Perhaps mostly plain text but with the ability to see styled text if you would like. I suspect text entry and manipulation could be much faster with the computationally intensive work at the back, formatting end. I know computers can do a good job in placing text and graphics TeX can do it. Perhaps I’m just a throwback to days before WYSIWYG but I’m not convinced it was that much a step forward.

Outliners don’t seem to even give a thought to styles. I’ve even built a Word macro so I can write in Brainstorm and provide hints (for example an h. or o. to indicate a header or ordered list, <e> for emphasized). The macro is smart enough to assume that text at the “bottom” of the hierarchy is “body text” but the .h allows flagging something that should be a header with nothing below it yet. Needless to say the result is tagged with the appropriate built in Word paragraph or character styles. Thus a simple change of template and the document is re-formatted nicely. I haven’t really written much with this yet but it looks promising.

I also have NoteMap 2 which I like but was shocked to find doesn’t use styles when exporting to Word (and I thought if anybody used styles it was lawyers).

So, thoughts??

Charles

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