New member, first post: comments and question

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 21, 2013 at 08:33 AM

Rick, welcome; I must say that your use of outliners makes me feel better about people working on policies (seriously). In the past I’ve contributed to such work and I was amazed that I saw people drafting policies without some kind of visual overview of what is already there.

On your question; I am currently on my Linux netbook and can’t test UV Outliner but I tend to concur with Dr Andus that this behaviour is on purpose. It is rather counter-intuitive for outliner users, but probably more evident for people who are used to plain text editors.

I believe that the logic is the following: in terms of organisation, the sequential order is one thing, the hierarchical order is another. One would start from a list of topics/ideas, then order them in terms of sequence, and then organise them hierarchically. Building on what Dr Andus said, this seems partly reasonable when writing, as one could first think of a ‘story’ (in fiction) or a ‘path’ to explaining/proving a concept/hypothesis (in non-fiction); then, one might organise that story or path into ‘chapters’.

If I’m right, UV Outliner expects you to first order D after E, and then to change its hierarchical level. I think this is also the behaviour of Maxthink, though it never really ‘stuck’ with me, so my recollection may be wrong.

To sum up, I don’t think that there is one right way of doing things, though my own expectation would be as yours, i.e. that the hierarchy/grouping takes precedence over the sequence.