Robert Caro's outliner

Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 15, 2012 at 03:01 PM

Gary Carson wrote:
>I also think the old-fashioned hard copy corkboard outlining
>method he’s using here is a million times more efficient than ANYTHING you’ll ever get
>from ANY program on ANY computer. You can scan the entire outline in a matter of
>seconds—nothing is faster than a visual scan. Full sheets of paper work much better
>than index cards because they can hold more information. You need the wall space,
>though.

You don’t just need wall space. You need a big office for the desks, space for filing cabinets etc. These are expensive resources. This is where computers introduce some social justice: they allow people with less means to achieve something very similar. The computer is a space-saving device.

Now that fairly large monitors are available on the mass market with high resolution, it should be possible to emulate at least partially this sort of corkboard solution. Personally I haven’t made much use of Scrivener’s corkboard exactly because only a summary of the document is available. I’d prefer to see a larger unit, such as A4.