Is there an outline program that allows tagging text with different layers?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 26, 2012 at 05:33 PM

Tall Guy, if I understand well your post, you are indeed talking of overlapping ‘layers’ on a plane and not of hierarchical ‘levels’ in an outline. If this is a case, I can’t think of any such software of the kind discussed here, though it is a common feature in design programs as you mentioned, but also GIS (Geographic Information Systems).

I expect you can achieve indeed the desired effect with such specialist software, but I imagine that you are probably looking for something more handy than a ‘sledgehammer’.

An alternative are presentation applications like PowerPoint; you can have multiple text boxes one on top of the other, and re-arrange them and enable/disable them at will (by making their text opaque or transparent respectively). As long as you keep the text boxes without a background colour, they will happily overlap. Not the most convenient thing to do, but it works.

May I ask what kind of application you have in mind? It does sound like quite an original idea in the world of personal information management.