Retrospective outlining

Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 1, 2012 at 01:42 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>This is an interesting topic. It relates to a feeling I’ve long had about outliners,
>namely that the ones which of restrict your outline to individual blocks of text are
>not really outliners at all. They are hierarchical information managers. A true
>outliner allows you to see the entire structure—including the text related to each
>heading of the outline—in a single window so that you not only understand the
>structure, but you also understand the flow of words.
> >In other words, what you’re
>looking for is an outline view and a document view, in which the document view shows
>your entire project in a single pane. Changes made in either view are instantly
>reflected in the other. Alternatively, an application could work the way old
>GrandView did. It was a single-pane outliner in which your text was visible inline,
>but could be switched on or off, so you could see it all, or just the structure. In my
>view, none of the current outliners (OmniOutliner, Neo) handle inline text well
>enough to really pull this off.

Interesting point, Steve, about outliners not being outliners…

>I
>would say that ConnectedText is likely the best at this, another reason for admiring
>it.

I think CT is not quite there yet either. The problem at the moment is that if you are working on a long document, then the table of contents view gets long too, and so switching back and forth between the view and edit mode requires a lot of scrolling in the TOC pane. Although you can collapse headings and thus make the TOC text appear without the scroll bar, for some reason CT expands the collapsed headings every time one saves the document or switches between the view and edit mode (switching is required for updating the TOC).

Alexander, thanks for the SENSE suggestion. I looked at it in the past and I couldn’t quite figure out what I could use it for. But if it can do this kind of iterative, retrospective outlining with large documents, then that would be an interesting niche and worth taking another look.

I will check out Writer’s Blocks too, though the price is a big disincentive for spending time with it, given the features that it seems to have, which seem rather basic. But that’s just my first impression and perhaps an unfair one.

As for Brainstorm, I have the same problem as I had with CT for many years. Whenever I looked at it I just couldn’t get my head around it quickly enough to carry on. But as my CT experience had just taught me, there might be rewards for persevering…