Celtx -- Anyone aware of this program?

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 13, 2012 at 10:44 PM

I’ve been putting Outline 4D through its paces (they only give you 5 days to trial it). In many ways I’m really impressed with it. The ability to add inline text in the outliner alone makes it stand out (alongside UV Outliner and Inspiration), and it has multiple sophisticated views yo go with it (headings only, headings and inline text, only inline text, or custom views).

The ability to colour the outline in by hierarchical levels is also a unique feature (I only know of Natara Bonsai, and perhaps BrainStorm, sort of, that can do it). The timeline or index card view is nothing short of revolutionary in my view, especially the Scale Tool. Yes, the vertical rendering that kicks in when you zoom out may not be ideal, but the overall concept is still very cool.

I haven’t yet tested the Tracking feature but the ability to tag the index cards and then display the linkages to the tags along a horizontal view under the “timeline” view is also ingenious.

BUT I have to agree with Gary that while in theory all this sounds great, there is something about the execution that gets in the way of focusing on the writing. Despite the various zooming and scaling tools, I just found I spent too much time trying to get the view right, rather than working on the actual outline. With this much effort I could just as well construct a perfectly viewable cork board in TreeSheets and I could view it simultaneously with the outline, rather than having to switch back and forth.

Also, Outline 4D has problems running in Win7. I need to run it in XP mode, and even then I had a few crashes when I changed some settings and then wanted to switch from outline to timeline view, with scary messages like this one:

“Exception thrown in destructor
(f:\dd\vctools\vc71 ibs\ship\atlmfc\src\mfc\winfrm.cpp:14 2)
Encountered an improper argument.”

Plus, it’s rather expensive for what it is. The cheapest price I found was USD79 (and it’s USD94.99 on their own website).

So I’m really torn. While I’d be interested in giving it a go, I’m not sure I am willing to entrust all my dissertation outlining to a software that gives you these sorts of error messages a few hours into the trial.

This whole experience made me download Inspiration 9 for the n-th time, to see whether I could put up with its font rendering after all, as I really need an outliner with inline notes that is stable enough. Then I could just replicate Outline 4D’s timeline view in TreeSheets.