Sense editor vs Writing Outliner

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Posted by Cassius
May 16, 2011 at 10:28 PM

The Sense editing program ( http://www.silvaelm.co.uk/ ) was just mentioned in this forum. For anyone who has used it and used Writing Outliner, I have two questions.

1. What are the advantages/disadvantages of each as compared with the other?

2. What advantages, if any, does Sense have over the better two-pane outliners?

Thanks!

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 17, 2011 at 10:18 PM

In summary, I think that they are two very different beasts:

- Writing Outliner is in its own words, a tool for “writing book-length documents in MS Word”. Each node in a WO project is a different Word document. See here http://writingoutliner.com/writing-software/blog/tag/mind-map/ for WO’s positioning as described by its developer.

- By contrast, Sense provides excellent micro-editing functionality without losing the perspective: e.g. each paragraph in the (right) editing pane is represented in the (left) content explorer.

In the ideal world, I would use Writing Outliner to organise a major book project, and Sense to maintain structure and flow at the chapter level. However, in both programs I miss interconnectivity: in Sense an easy way to export to Word in proper formatting, and in WO an easy way to import an existing structure.

Posted by Edwin Yip
May 18, 2011 at 08:44 AM

@Cassius,
I haven’t noticed Sense before, just looked at it’s screenshot, my first impression was - was it a wiki-like local text editor? I might be wrong.

@Alexander,
Thanks. I have to agree with you, importing documents from external sources is what should be improved in the future for Writing Outliner.

—-
Edwin Yip
Turn MS Word into a full-featured outliner software for long document writers.
http://WritingOutliner.com

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 19, 2011 at 02:54 PM

Edwin wrote:
>I haven’t noticed Sense before, just looked at it’s screenshot, my first
>impression was - was it a wiki-like local text editor?

Actually no; it’s basically a two-pane outliner especially built for writing. You can think of it as an object-oriented text editor. On the left you have a tree of placeholders representing textual objects (paragraphs, titles, bullets etc) and on the right you have the actual text.

The main difference with a classic two-pane outliner is that you can see the full text flow on the right, not just the one corresponding to the placeholder selected on the left. So you have the document overview and the detail both available in front of you. Something like an MS Word document with an (editable) document map.

>importing documents from external sources is what should be improved
>in the future for Writing Outliner.

Great!

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