The ultimate outliner

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 17, 2013 at 05:02 PM

Grieser wrote:
>Wait a moment:
>Now, we’re leaving outliners and getting into writing environments.
>Or do you really write that much in Bonsai, Noteliner, Notemap,
>OmniOutliner, Neo, etc. to REALLY need these features?

>Sorry, I am just trying to keep the feature set as small as possible :-)

In the first post I did say “‘Outlining’ in this sense though could still span the entire writing process, from brainstorming, note-taking, organising, analysis, to synthesis, outlining, drafting and writing up.”

But I understand your concern. Nevertheless, it is already possible in Outline 4D to switch between a skeletal outline and one with long inline notes with a single mouse-click or hotkey combination.

My biggest problem with outliners recently has been how to move from the initial skeletal outline to one with inline notes and then to the first draft. it throws up all kinds of conceptual and technical problems. And the solution has been to use an outliner (O4D) rather than a “writing environment” (such as Scrivener) for the drafting/writing up, so that reverse outlining can be carried out (which is what the above feature can also be used for).