Writing Outliner for MS Word Soon on BitsDuJour

Posted by 22111
Aug 2, 2013 at 05:14 PM

“Nothing is really physically moved as such when you drag things around except the order that WO knows the files needs to be handled in when you output the data into a new (full) Word file.”

Thank you for your clarifications, but you also say, you do not write in WO, which should mean you navigate in the WO tree, but then you write within the physical Word files that are displayed by this navigation. I have tremendous difficulty to imagine WO leaving these physical Word files intact when you make some (not physically replicated) moves from within the tree, then moves of parts of text from your editing the physical files, and what when the latter are not bound to specific titles/subtitles ranges, but overlap with such? I’t very easy for me, though, to image total chaos that would quickly be created by this.

Perhaps WO does not update the physical files but at the end of your work session or such, but leaving them unchanged for months, in spite of your perhaps total physical overhaul of most of them, by editing the physical files, in-between?

If what you say is correct, the synchronization between Word and WO might be less stringent than I had imagined; I could also devise a rather light system in which it’s just the title/subtitle structure (and their possible renames) that is constantly processed / synched, but well, is this really enough?

Perhaps yes; this is a totally new concept for the execution of such a task; perhaps I thought about this in too traditional a way. Highly interesting subject to reflect upon.

But if I understand well, this deliberate abstention from implementing “real programming power” then implies the “destructive” running of sort of a macro which once and for all will put “everything” into a global physical file, but from which point on cannot be split up, except for doing it again, manually, with new files, into its original component files.

From what I read there, WO preserves footnotes; the technically much more complicated cross-references not being mentioned an rather improbable that WO could manage them this way, even once and for all then.

I had of course assumed WO was the easy way to shuffle around your text parts within a global “project” (which, when done manually, is a lot of work, but would not technically interfere with rebuilding a global outline for all these, then, each time, but the way you describe it.

I understand much better now why WO has not yet been sold to every Word user, but there is a certain probability the developer is transferring his tool to a file system based tool exactly for this reason, in order to shift the physical parts together with your tree moves, a thing the Word outline, for a single file, does, of course, so at any moment, your things are in a “proper state”.

Anyway, this is very intriguing software, but which I’ll not buy yet, this time, knowing this very strange detail.