Outliner notes

[liam_on_linux]

Word is a nightmare.

«

RT ColiegeStudent on Twitter 

 

using microsoft word

 

*moves an image 1 mm to the left*

 

all text and images shift. 4 new pages appear. in the distance, sirens.

»

But there's still a lot of power in that festering ball of 1980s code.

In 6 weeks in 2016, I drafted, wrote, illustrated, laid out and submitted a ~330 page technical maintenance manual for a 3D printer, solo, entirely in MS Word from start to finish. I began in Word 97 & finished it in Word 2003, 95% of the time running under WINE on Linux... and 90% of the time, using it in Outline Mode, which is a *vastly* powerful writer's tool which the FOSS word has nothing even vaguely comparable to.

But as a novice... Yeah, what the tweet said. It's a timeless classic IMHO.

Some Emacs folks told me Org-mode is just as good as an outliner. I've tried it. This was my response.

Org mode compared to Word 2003 Outline View is roughly MS-DOS Edlin compared to Emacs. It's a tiny fragmentary partial implementation of 1% of the functionality, done badly, with a terrible *terrible* UI.

No exaggeration, no hyperbole, and there's a reason I specifically said 2003 and nothing later.

 

I've been building and running xNix boxes since 1988. I have often tried both Vi and Emacs over nearly 4 decades. I am unusual in terms of old Unix hands: I cordially detest both of them.

The reason I cite Word 2003 is that that's the last version with the old menu and toolbar UI. Everything later has a "ribbon" and I find it unusable.

Today, the web-app/Android/iOS versions of Word do not have Outline View, no. Only the rich local app versions do.

But no, org-mode is not a better richer alternative; it is vastly inferior, to the point of being almost a parody.

It's really not. I tried it, and I found it a slightly sad crippled little thing that might be OK for managing my to-do list.

Hidden behind Emacs' *awful* 1970s UI which I would personally burn in a fire rather than ever use.

So, no, I don't think it's a very useful or capable outliner from what I have seen. Logseq has a better one.

To extend my earlier comparison:

Org-mode to Word's Outline View is Edlin to Emacs.

Logseq to Outline View is MS-DOS 5 EDIT to Emacs: it's a capable full-screen text editor that I know and like and which works fine. It's not very powerful but what it does, it does fine.

Is Org-mode aimed at something else? Maybe, yes. I don't know who or what it's aimed at, so I can't really say.
 

Word Outline Mode is the last surviving 1980s outliner, an entire category of app that's disappeared.

http://outliners.com/default.html

It's a good one but it was once one among many. It is, for me, *THE* killer feature of MS Word, and the only thing I keep WINE on my computers for.

It's a prose writer's tool, for writing long-form documents in a human language.

Emacs is a programmer's editor for writing program code in programming languages.

So, no, they are not the same thing, but the superficial similarity confuses people.
 

I must pick a fairly small example as I'm not very familiar with Emacs.

In Outline Mode, a paragraph's level in the hierarchy is tied with its paragraph style. Most people don't know how to use Word's style sheets, but think of HTML. Word has 9 heading levels, like H1...H9 on the Web, plus Body Text, which is always the lowest level.

As you promote or demote a paragraph, its style automatically changes to match.

(This has the side effect that you can see the level from the style. If that bothered you, in old versions you could turn off showing the formatting.)

As you move a block of hierarchical text around the outline all its levels automatically adopt the correct styles for their current location.

This means that when I wrote a manual in it, I did *no formatting by hand* at all. The text of the entire document is *automatically* formatted according to whether it's a chapter heading, or section, or subsection, or subsubsection, etc.

When you're done Word can automatically generate a table of contents, or an index, or both, that picks up all those section headings. Both assign page numbers "live", so if you move, add or delete any section, the ToC and index update immediately with the new positions and page numbers.
 

I say a small example as most professional writers don't deal with the formatting at all. That's the job of someone else in a different department.

Or, in technical writing, this is the job of some program. It's the sort of thing that Linux folks get very excited about LaTeX and LyX, or for which documentarians praise DocBook or DITA, but I've used both of those and they need a*vast* amount of manual labour -- and *very* complex tooling.

XML etc are also *extremely* fragile. One punctuation mark in the wrong place and 50 pages of formatting is broken or goes haywire. I've spent days troubleshooting one misplaced `:`. It's horrible.

Word can do all this automatically, and most people *don't even know the function is there.* It's like driving an articulated lorry as a personal car and never noticing that it can carry 40 tonnes of cargo! Worse still, people attach a trailer and roofrack and load them up with stuff... *because they don't know their vehicle can carry 10 cars already* as a built in feature.

I could take a sub sub section of a chapter and promote it to a chapter in its own right, and adjust the formatting of 100 pages, in about 6 or 8 keystrokes. That will also rebuild the index and redo the table of contents, automatically, for me.
 

All this can be entirely keyboard driven, or entirely mouse driven, according to the user's preference. Or any mixture of both, of course. I'm a keyboard warrior myself. I can live entirely without a pointing device and it barely slows me down.

You can with a couple of clicks collapse the whole book to just chapter headings, or just those and subheadings, or just all the headings and no body text... Any of 9 levels, as you choose. You can hide all the lower levels, restructure the whole thing, and then show them again. You can adjust formatting by adjusting indents in the overview, and then expand it again to see what happened and if it's what you want.

You could go crazy... zoom out to the top level, add a few new headings, indent under the new headings, and suddenly in a few clicks, your 1 big book is now 2 or 3 or 4 smaller books, each with its own set of chapters, headings, sub headings, sub sub headings etc. Each can have its own table of contents and index, all automatically generated and updated and formatted.
 

I'm an xNix guy, mainly. I try to avoid Windows as much as possible, but the early years of my career were supporting DOS and then Windows. There is good stuff there, and credit where it's due.

(MS Office on macOS also does this, but the keyboard UI is much clunkier.)

Outliners were just an everyday tool once. MS just built a good one into Word, way back in the DOS era. Word for DOS can do all this stuff too and it did it in like 200kB of RAM in 1988!

Integrating it into a word processor makes sense, but they were standalone apps.

It's not radical tech. This is really old, basic stuff. But somehow in the switch to GUIs on the PC, they got lost in the transition.

And no, LibreOffice/Abiword/CalligraWords has nothing even resembling this.
 

There are 2 types of outliner: intrinsic and extrinsic, also known as 1-pane or 2-pane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner#Layout

There are multiple 2-pane outliners that are FOSS.

But they are tools for organising info, and are almost totally useless for writers.

There are almost no intrinsic outliners in the FOSS world. I've been looking for years. The only one I know is LoqSeq, but it is just for note-taking and it does none of the formatting/indexing/ToC stuff I mentioned. It does handle Markdown but with zero integration with the outline structure.

So it's like going from Emacs to Notepad. All the clever stuff is gone, but you can still edit plain text.

 

Comments

[history_monk]

I used to use PC-Outline a lot. That was a dedicated outliner for MS-DOS, written in assembler and very fast, even on an 8088-based Poqet Pc. It was shareware and Brown Bag software were significant for a few years. But they got taken over, and somewhere along the line the person who wrote it got separated from the source and it stopped getting bug fixes and printer support.

Nowadays, I write code in an outliner. The history is a bit twisty. Back in 1984-85, my current employer, a decade before I joined them, had decided that their Fortran-based product had no future and that they didn't really like any of the programming environments that were available. So they created a new one.

They were impressed with Occam and its folding editor, but the language was no good for their purposes, because transputers didn't have virtual memory or floating point (as of then). So they adopted the folding file format as a container file, with tagged folds to specify code structure and wrote an editor of their own to handle it. That was originally for VMS with VT-100 terminals, but it got ported to X-Windows, and still runs today. It isn't that powerful, so we created loadable modes for VIM and Gnu Emacs to supplement it.

I have a folded file that's my work diary. I accomplish work as a side-effect of writing things down. It has my to-do-list, my working notes on projects, all that kind of thing. There's a fold for each week, collected into months, and an archive file for each year. It works really well.

I don't get to write books any more at work. I did in a previous job, with WordStar and Ventura Publisher. Work makes me use modern Word for documents now, which is annoying, but most of them are quite short.

[liam_on_linux]

Thanks for the comment!

I don't post here a lot but it does feel a little like shouting into the void.

Is this editor FOSS (he asked forlornly)?

[history_monk]

None of our folding editors have been released outside the product group. You wouldn't want the X-Windows one, it's in our custom programming language, and not very powerful, apart from the folding.

The VIM and Emacs modes could be released, but it would be "John lets Liam have a copy" rather than "Set up a FOSS project for it."