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Posted by RickFencer
Apr 19, 2013 at 11:28 PM
I’ve been an interested reader of this forum for several years and want to first offer my thanks to all of you for both insightful commentary and for great suggestions on outlining software and its uses. I work in the policy and political world and use outlines for putting together legislation, structuring and writing speeches and speech notes for my self and others, and for a variety of other writing and organizing uses. I’m a Windows and Android guy and I go all the way back to PC Outline and Grandview, both of which I love and still have copies of.
For Android users, check out Halna Outliner. It’s pretty new and I don’t recall anyone mentioning it in this forum before. It’s a fairly simple 2-pane outliner but I prefer it to Android Outliner both because I can have both the navigation and content panes on the screen at the same time and because it uses very simple plain text files that I can export to, or import from, any plain text editor. See what you think.
And now, my question:
Most of my outlining work is creating content so I have a strong preference for single-pane outliners, which are pretty scare in Windows world. I have UV Outliner, Noteliner, and TkOutline. I was using UV Outline today and came across what appears to be a structural problem that I’ve never seen in any other single-pane outliner so I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong:
If I have an outline that looks like this:
-A
-B
-C
-D
-E
-F
C, D, and E are children of B. Now I want to move, say, D to be a child of A rather than B. In every other outliner I’ve used when I move D to the left it is relocated to look like this:
-A
-B
-C
-E
-D
-F
and I can then move it up under A and then indent it to make it a child of A. No problem. However, in UV Outliner (latest version 2.4.4) what happens is this:
-A
-B
-C
-D
-E
-F
D has been moved to the correct level, but the parent-child relationship of every child of B below D has been changed so that it is now a child of D rather than B. And when D is moved around the outline its new child E follows. I recognize that I could first move D to the bottom of the list of children before moving to the left, but that is awkward and unintuitive, especially if I’m dealing with a complex hierarchy of nodes.
So… has anyone else experienced this? Am I doing something wrong?
Rick
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 20, 2013 at 08:21 PM
RickFencer wrote:
>D has been moved to the correct level, but the parent-child relationship
>of every child of B below D has been changed so that it is now a child
>of D rather than B. And when D is moved around the outline its new
>child E follows. I recognize that I could first move D to the bottom of
>the list of children before moving to the left, but that is awkward and
>unintuitive, especially if I’m dealing with a complex hierarchy of
>nodes.
>
>So… has anyone else experienced this? Am I doing something wrong?
Rick - welcome to the forum. I don’t use UV Outliner, so I can’t comment on how this feature is implemented there. But I wouldn’t say it’s conceptually wrong. There are uses where such behaviour can come in handy. E.g. Outline 4D also behaves that way if the given level is not collapsed (if it is collapsed, the item takes its children with it).
I don’t know about UV Outliner’s rationale, but in O4D the point is to give the writer more flexibility in restructuring the text, and it does provide some interesting and funky tools to build on that feature.
Perhaps another point is that both UV Outliner and O4D allow inline notes, as opposed to let’s say Noteliner or Bonsai, which follow the more commonly accepted behaviour that you describe (and are one step removed from the act of writing).
Posted by RickFencer
Apr 20, 2013 at 08:42 PM
Good point. Probably comes under the heading of “get the right tool for the job”.
Many thanks.
Posted by Cassius
Apr 21, 2013 at 06:29 AM
Seems like a bug to me. Have you tried dragging D (from B) and dropping D onto A?
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 21, 2013 at 08:33 AM
Rick, welcome; I must say that your use of outliners makes me feel better about people working on policies (seriously). In the past I’ve contributed to such work and I was amazed that I saw people drafting policies without some kind of visual overview of what is already there.
On your question; I am currently on my Linux netbook and can’t test UV Outliner but I tend to concur with Dr Andus that this behaviour is on purpose. It is rather counter-intuitive for outliner users, but probably more evident for people who are used to plain text editors.
I believe that the logic is the following: in terms of organisation, the sequential order is one thing, the hierarchical order is another. One would start from a list of topics/ideas, then order them in terms of sequence, and then organise them hierarchically. Building on what Dr Andus said, this seems partly reasonable when writing, as one could first think of a ‘story’ (in fiction) or a ‘path’ to explaining/proving a concept/hypothesis (in non-fiction); then, one might organise that story or path into ‘chapters’.
If I’m right, UV Outliner expects you to first order D after E, and then to change its hierarchical level. I think this is also the behaviour of Maxthink, though it never really ‘stuck’ with me, so my recollection may be wrong.
To sum up, I don’t think that there is one right way of doing things, though my own expectation would be as yours, i.e. that the hierarchy/grouping takes precedence over the sequence.