More 3.1 v WordPerfect 3.5e
Posted by kydland
on 7/11/2000
kydland
7/11/2000 11:31 am
Hi!
I am about to select outlining software for a major project on my Mac. The two finalists seem to be More and WP. Am I right in this?
(Have also looked at/have Acta, StoryProject, Palimpsest, FullWrite, In Control, InfoDepot and more. Cannot get my hands on MindWrite, IdeaLiner, Ready! ThoughtPattern and ThinkTank.)
More¥s hoisting seems vital to me. Am I right in this? Does Wp 3.5e have hoisting, or can it be emulated?
By the way, I hate the way More handles promoting/moving left, by moving the headline in question to the end of the section and only then left. Is there a workaround?
Yours, ÿystein, Norway
I am about to select outlining software for a major project on my Mac. The two finalists seem to be More and WP. Am I right in this?
(Have also looked at/have Acta, StoryProject, Palimpsest, FullWrite, In Control, InfoDepot and more. Cannot get my hands on MindWrite, IdeaLiner, Ready! ThoughtPattern and ThinkTank.)
More¥s hoisting seems vital to me. Am I right in this? Does Wp 3.5e have hoisting, or can it be emulated?
By the way, I hate the way More handles promoting/moving left, by moving the headline in question to the end of the section and only then left. Is there a workaround?
Yours, ÿystein, Norway
n.lowe
7/14/2000 5:04 pm
Can't help with WordPerfect, but you should check out Inspiration if you haven't yet. Inspiration does hoisting (but not gather and clone), and in addition has a further hoist-like feature in the ability to embed documents within documents as "children". Its strongest feature, of course, is its amazing diagram mode. Which program works best for you will depend on the nature of your project, but if it's primarily a writing project I'd go with MORE, and if it's more about planning & thinking & organising then Inspiration is a better bet. But of course there's nothing to stop you using both in harness; Inspiration still imports & exports MORE outlines (better, in fact, than any other file format), and both programs are so good in their complementary ways that it would be a shame to deny oneself the synergy of the two together. 30-day demo & tutorial downloadable from http://www.inspiration.com
As for the move-left function, most outliners behave in a similar way to MORE here (Word is an exception, but I don't think that quite does what you want either, if I've understood right). The usual "workaround" is to do the demote before rather than after the move left, and if necessary follow up with a promote; this will keep the headline you're moving in the same vertical position in the document. In some contexts it's useful to add a blank dummy headline, do a demote-left-promote sequence to move the items you want as temporary subheads of your dummy headline, and then delete the blank headline again. This is quite hard to describe (and not helped by the fact that in other outliners the words promote & demote are assigned to the opposite functions!) - but a bit of practice and you soon develop an instinct for the keystroke sequences that will get headlines where you want them in the hierarchy, without being necessarily able to explain why what you're doing works!
As for the move-left function, most outliners behave in a similar way to MORE here (Word is an exception, but I don't think that quite does what you want either, if I've understood right). The usual "workaround" is to do the demote before rather than after the move left, and if necessary follow up with a promote; this will keep the headline you're moving in the same vertical position in the document. In some contexts it's useful to add a blank dummy headline, do a demote-left-promote sequence to move the items you want as temporary subheads of your dummy headline, and then delete the blank headline again. This is quite hard to describe (and not helped by the fact that in other outliners the words promote & demote are assigned to the opposite functions!) - but a bit of practice and you soon develop an instinct for the keystroke sequences that will get headlines where you want them in the hierarchy, without being necessarily able to explain why what you're doing works!