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Retrospective outlining
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 1, 2012 at 11:48 AM
This is an interesting topic. It relates to a feeling I’ve long had about outliners, namely that the ones which of restrict your outline to individual blocks of text are not really outliners at all. They are hierarchical information managers. A true outliner allows you to see the entire structure—including the text related to each heading of the outline—in a single window so that you not only understand the structure, but you also understand the flow of words.
In other words, what you’re looking for is an outline view and a document view, in which the document view shows your entire project in a single pane. Changes made in either view are instantly reflected in the other. Alternatively, an application could work the way old GrandView did. It was a single-pane outliner in which your text was visible inline, but could be switched on or off, so you could see it all, or just the structure. In my view, none of the current outliners (OmniOutliner, Neo) handle inline text well enough to really pull this off.
In fact, the number of applications which actually do this is very small. Scrivener comes close with its scrivenings view, which shows your project in one flowing document, and has the option of displaying titles. You can edit titles and text in the scrivenings view and those changes are reflected in the Binder. However, in a quick test I just made it looks like you can’t rearrange the sections in the scrivenings view without messing up the Binder. (This relates to the Mac version of Scrivener. I doubt the PC version is even this sophisticated.)
I would say that ConnectedText is likely the best at this, another reason for admiring it.
Steve Z.
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 1, 2012 at 01:42 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>This is an interesting topic. It relates to a feeling I’ve long had about outliners,
>namely that the ones which of restrict your outline to individual blocks of text are
>not really outliners at all. They are hierarchical information managers. A true
>outliner allows you to see the entire structure—including the text related to each
>heading of the outline—in a single window so that you not only understand the
>structure, but you also understand the flow of words.
>
>In other words, what you’re
>looking for is an outline view and a document view, in which the document view shows
>your entire project in a single pane. Changes made in either view are instantly
>reflected in the other. Alternatively, an application could work the way old
>GrandView did. It was a single-pane outliner in which your text was visible inline,
>but could be switched on or off, so you could see it all, or just the structure. In my
>view, none of the current outliners (OmniOutliner, Neo) handle inline text well
>enough to really pull this off.
Interesting point, Steve, about outliners not being outliners…
>I
>would say that ConnectedText is likely the best at this, another reason for admiring
>it.
I think CT is not quite there yet either. The problem at the moment is that if you are working on a long document, then the table of contents view gets long too, and so switching back and forth between the view and edit mode requires a lot of scrolling in the TOC pane. Although you can collapse headings and thus make the TOC text appear without the scroll bar, for some reason CT expands the collapsed headings every time one saves the document or switches between the view and edit mode (switching is required for updating the TOC).
Alexander, thanks for the SENSE suggestion. I looked at it in the past and I couldn’t quite figure out what I could use it for. But if it can do this kind of iterative, retrospective outlining with large documents, then that would be an interesting niche and worth taking another look.
I will check out Writer’s Blocks too, though the price is a big disincentive for spending time with it, given the features that it seems to have, which seem rather basic. But that’s just my first impression and perhaps an unfair one.
As for Brainstorm, I have the same problem as I had with CT for many years. Whenever I looked at it I just couldn’t get my head around it quickly enough to carry on. But as my CT experience had just taught me, there might be rewards for persevering…
Posted by Eduardo Mauro
Apr 1, 2012 at 04:46 PM
>I think CT is not quite there yet either. The problem at the moment is
>that if you are working on a long document, then the table of contents view gets long
>too, and so switching back and forth between the view and edit mode requires a lot of
>scrolling in the TOC pane. Although you can collapse headings and thus make the TOC
>text appear without the scroll bar, for some reason CT expands the collapsed headings
>every time one saves the document or switches between the view and edit mode
>(switching is required for updating the TOC).
Dr Andus,
If you have any suggestion of how we can improve CT regarding this, let me know.
BTW, we just released a new version.
Best regards,
Eduardo Mauro
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 1, 2012 at 06:11 PM
Eduardo Mauro wrote:
>If you have any suggestion of how we can
>improve CT regarding this, let me know.
Hi Eduardo,
I don’t know how easy it is to do technically but if the collapsed headings would stay collapsed when switching from the edit mode to the view mode (and thus updating/refreshing the TOC) that would do the trick. Then one could work on a very long document because by collapsing level one headers for instance the TOC text would be visible in the pane and there would be no need to scroll.
An alternative and improved solution could be to have a keyboard shortcut or a button somewhere that could update the TOC without having to switch from edit to view mode (and also keeping collapsed headers collapsed).
Thanks for your consideration. I’m looking forward to upgrading to the new version.
Posted by Cassius
Apr 2, 2012 at 12:37 AM
The following rather fits the title, if not the subject:
In high school & college, long before PCs, we were supposed to first create an outline and then write the document. I always did the reverse.
When GrandView came, I immediately purchased it and used it for everything. I even created a macro to reverse an outline’s hierarchy. I still didn’t “outline” first, but wrote my documents in GV so I could easily rearrange the text when I thought it was appropriate.