Outliner for redacting?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 22, 2011 at 10:25 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
>1. import original Word or RTF;
>2. turn it into an outline
>based on the topic sentences (main idea) in each paragraph;

1 and 2 can be done by several mindmapping programs (MindView springs to mind as one of the best), and also the humble MyInfo. Styles should be used in paragraph titles to be correctly identified. Thereon however, none of these tools are particularly aimed at writing, so you may not find them very comfortable.

Assuming that rich text is secondary, my own choice would be Brainstorm (BrainstormSW or BrainstormWFO or whatever it is called these days :-) Here’s what I would do:

- Copy paste the whole text under a header, say ‘ORIGINAL’ in Brainstorm.

- Paste it again, under a second heading, say, ‘REDACTED’; Brainstorm will identify each identical paragraph as a ‘namesake’. Press Ctrl-A and Ctrl-N to ‘cut off’ the relationship. This way, changes to one will not be reflected to the other.

- Keep two windows open, side by side, move to each corresponding paragraph, and edit the paragraph in place.

I have done the above several times in the past; I have not found something better yet. Sense Pro can now open two documents at the time, so it may indeed be well suited for such work, but I have not tried this aspect yet.