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

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 4, 2012 at 04:54 PM

Tall Guy wrote:
>This is intended to help create an outline for
>law school classes. I need to organize class notes, case briefs, notes
>from the text book, etc. However, at the end of the semester this ends
>up to be about a 200 page outline to study with. The exams are open
>notes, however a 200 page outline won’t help. So it would be nice to
>tag the important stuff throughout the semester, so that with a few
>mouse clicks I can shrink the outline down to a 30-40 page outline while
>keeping the same structure and headings of the 200 page outline.

There seem to be a number of separate requirements tied up here, with the 3rd one being crucial:
1) organise a large number of notes;
2) have a hierarchical structure;
3) ability to abstract by way of extraction.

Probably a number of different tools can do this, where its possible to extract annotations.

I would use ConnectedText for this. 1) it can handle large number of notes. 2) You can create a hierarchical structure by organising your links in a hierarchy in the home page or in its Outliner tool. 3) You can abstract by way of extraction in a number of ways:

a) by extracting a conclusion section from each note and “including” them in a summary page (using CT’s special “include” markup), as explained here:
http://drandus.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/caqdas-model-for-connectedtext/

b) by using the “properties” command, which allows you to mark up a max. 256 characters with spaces into a summary, which then can then be gathered together in multiple ways (e.g. simply by clicking on one of the links thus created).

I could also imagine a single-pane outliner with inline notes used for it, where the inline notes would contain the content, while the description of the outline items would contain the summary. Outline 4D for example would allow you to toggle these (only show the summaries, i.e. extracted abstracts) and even export the abstracts only, abstracts+notes or notes only.

I’d be also curious to know whether there are two-pane outliners that can do this (extraction of outline headings that can be long enough to constitute summaries).

>By the way, is an “outliner” software the same as software that makes
>outlines?

I think there is a lack of terminological unity. There is a huge variety of outliners out there for many different stages of the outlining and writing process. See e.g. Pierre’s list:
http://www.editgrid.com/user/pplandry/List_of_Outliners