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Sentence outliner?
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Posted by Cyganet
Feb 12, 2024 at 09:55 PM
I learned the one sentence per line technique from a writing course, as a method to encourage variable sentence lengths. I haven’t tried using it for outlining, because I typically outline ideas with nested bullets (even in plain text notes, emails, and so on).
Your question triggered a memory of having seen this feature somewhere, and indeed it was WriteMonkey 3 that had it.
Then I found out that the Markdown spec ignored single line breaks, and now I know why because that never made sense to me before. The longer I think about it, the more programs there are that support semantic line breaks. My online writing course notes, for example, are in ConnectedText which, you guessed it, ignore single line breaks in source mode when creating the reading mode page.
Posted by Lucas
Feb 13, 2024 at 11:39 PM
All very interesting, Cyganet. And yes, I’m remembering that now from ConnectedText. As far as having the best of both worlds, I’m now realizing that with Microsoft Word, it’s possible to edit in both semantic-line-break mode (with outlining features) and regular paragraph mode at the same time, by making the line breaks be hidden text (an awesome feature in Microsoft Word—the easiest way is to create a special linked style for which text is hidden). Here’s a screenshot, with Outline view on the left and Draft view on the right:
https://share.cleanshot.com/cg6qcF1Z
Posted by Franz Grieser
Feb 14, 2024 at 08:05 AM
Lucas wrote:
>... I’m now
>realizing that with Microsoft Word, it’s possible to edit in both
>semantic-line-break mode (with outlining features) and regular paragraph
>mode at the same time, by making the line breaks be hidden text (an
>awesome feature in Microsoft Word—the easiest way is to create a
>special linked style for which text is hidden).
How do you do that?
Do you need to add a space character after each full stop? In your screenshot the spaces are missing.
>with Outline view on the left and Draft view on the right:
Posted by Lucas
Feb 14, 2024 at 02:18 PM
@Franz Grieser:
True, I noticed after posting that spaces were missing. My mistake. Normally, I use this technique for writing, so I would incorporate the outlining aspect from the beginning, but to break up an existing text, as I did in the screenshot, the steps would be something like this:
1) Create a linked style for which text is hidden (“Hidden” is available in the font menu). Let’s call the new style “MyHiddenStyle”.
2) For the text you want to break up, use find/replace to replace all original paragraph breaks with something temporary, say, “myparagraphbreak”.
3) Use find/replace to replace every “. ” [period plus space] with “. ^p” [period plus a paragraph break plus a space].
4) Use find/replace to replace every paragraph break with a paragraph break that uses “MyHiddenStyle”. (Find/replace includes Style choices.)
5) To restore the original paragraph breaks, use find/replace to replace “myparagraphbreak” with “^p”.
6) In my example, I also added paragraph headings manually (e.g., “Paragraph 1”) and put them in MyHiddenStyle. And I used Outline View to organize the lines hierarchically.
7) Finally, there are various ways to configure what is displayed in each window. In the screenshot, I had used Mac, so I would have to double-check how it is on Windows. But on Mac, for each window, it seems to be possible to use Settings to independently choose which hidden characters are shown. So, for the Outline View window, I went to View | Show Non-Printing Characters and selected “Hidden text”. Whereas for the Draft View window, I didn’t have any hidden characters displaying, and thus the hidden text is not visible.
(Of course, in my posted screenshot, I messed up the find/replace steps and accidentally removed the spaces between sentences.)
Posted by Franz Grieser
Feb 14, 2024 at 03:39 PM
Thanks Lucas.
I was wondering what you meant by “linked style”. I usually don’t work in Word but most of my writer clients do.
I find the “one sentence per paragraph” trick helpful to check sentence length and rhythm (not for writing but in the editing stage).