Re: MORE: Web Info Architecture; VISIO-the joke

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 235

Posted by mfischer
1999-08-26 08:47:39

I would agree that Inspiration (v4 or v5, v5 was a giant step sideways) is the most useful current outliner but the operative word is “current” rather than “outliner.” I have used Inspiration sporadically since the mid-1990s, and find it useful when the primary objective is to produce a graphical rendition of structured, text-based information. However, Inspiration lacks both the referential power (cloning, etc) and the text editing and formatting capabilities that make MORE an indispensable tool for WRITING. Inspiration may be a worthy successor to MORE if your needs are to organize information for graphic presentation, but if you need a tool to organize documents and write prose, Inspiration is not even in 2nd place.

On the other subtopic of this thread—generation of flowcharts from structured information—there IS a current, cross-platform tool that does an adquate job (and is light years ahead of Visio). That tool is TopDown from Kaetron Software (http://www.kaetron.com). TopDown is basically an object-based graphic editing program which understands heirarchy as well as inter-object connections on a single drawing. It has some annoying characteristics, and sometimes has to be coerced into producing the desired graphical rendition, but these are mild annoyances compared to what is needed to get a decent rendition of a complex graphic in PowerPoint. TopDown is NOT an outliner, but it can generate text output that presents its heirarchy as an outline, and can import line-oriented outliner text output into connected sequences of flowchart symbols according to selectable (but very limited) rules.

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