Importing and Exporting Outlines

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 457

Posted by cjgillis
2000-01-17 12:01:08

If a modern outliner is to be useful to users, then it should be able to import old outline files correctly. I’m not referring to small to-do lists. I’m talking about real work.

For many years Iíve built a mystery reference in Acta outline format. My outlines are the result of hundreds of thousands of enjoyable or disgusted hours that I spent reading thousands of murder mysteries, by hundreds of US, British, and World authors. I looked for authors that I’d recommend to house-bound, voracious mystery readers searching for reliable mystery authors to follow through decades of their best work.

Although my reference contains less than 100 authors and somewhat more than 1000 books, I’ve been forced split my outlines into several 200 K files. The more authors and books that I add, the more I have to split my outlines. I’ve hung on to old Mac computers in part in order to be able to use Acta for as long as possible.

Now, I want an outliner that can manage my old, gigantic Acta files using MacOS 9 or MacOS X on a G4 computer, with no freezes or crashes due to memory or file-management problems.

If I’m to be persuaded to spend up to $200-$700 for a new outliner, it has to be able to import my Acta-format outlines in full. Currently:
* I can open Text, More, or Thinktank files into Acta Outliner.
* I can save Acta files as Acta, Text-only, MailMerge, More, PICT, Word RTF, MacWrite, Thinktank, Works, or WriteNow files.

I want to be able to open Acta files in any new outliner, accessing Acta’s page symbols, too often overlooked by outline designers.An outlined Acta subtopic can then be developed, if necessary, into one FrameMaker 5.5 page, or one Inspiration 6 diagram.

If I upgrade my software, I shouldn’t open my old 200-page Acta files into new ???-page, new-outline files, only to have to re-page them back to 200 full pages, when Acta’s new-page symbols were right there in my Acta file.

Carolyn Jane Gillis

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