New member, first post: comments and question

Posted by RickFencer
Apr 19, 2013 at 11:28 PM

I’ve been an interested reader of this forum for several years and want to first offer my thanks to all of you for both insightful commentary and for great suggestions on outlining software and its uses. I work in the policy and political world and use outlines for putting together legislation, structuring and writing speeches and speech notes for my self and others, and for a variety of other writing and organizing uses. I’m a Windows and Android guy and I go all the way back to PC Outline and Grandview, both of which I love and still have copies of.

For Android users, check out Halna Outliner. It’s pretty new and I don’t recall anyone mentioning it in this forum before. It’s a fairly simple 2-pane outliner but I prefer it to Android Outliner both because I can have both the navigation and content panes on the screen at the same time and because it uses very simple plain text files that I can export to, or import from, any plain text editor. See what you think.

And now, my question:
Most of my outlining work is creating content so I have a strong preference for single-pane outliners, which are pretty scare in Windows world. I have UV Outliner, Noteliner, and TkOutline. I was using UV Outline today and came across what appears to be a structural problem that I’ve never seen in any other single-pane outliner so I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong:

If I have an outline that looks like this:

-A
-B
-C
-D
-E
-F

C, D, and E are children of B. Now I want to move, say, D to be a child of A rather than B. In every other outliner I’ve used when I move D to the left it is relocated to look like this:

-A
-B
-C
-E
-D
-F

and I can then move it up under A and then indent it to make it a child of A. No problem. However, in UV Outliner (latest version 2.4.4) what happens is this:

-A
-B
-C
-D
-E
-F

D has been moved to the correct level, but the parent-child relationship of every child of B below D has been changed so that it is now a child of D rather than B. And when D is moved around the outline its new child E follows. I recognize that I could first move D to the bottom of the list of children before moving to the left, but that is awkward and unintuitive, especially if I’m dealing with a complex hierarchy of nodes.

So… has anyone else experienced this? Am I doing something wrong?

Rick