Back to ConnectedText

Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 11, 2013 at 12:43 PM

andyjim wrote:
>Most do not have their own filenames

As Steve has suggested, you can import your existing Word documents and then chop them up using the “cut to new topic” function.

>ICan you do this
>(drop text in, then mess with it in the outliner) in other outliner
>apps?

Well, each of them have strengths and weaknesses in this respect.

>So one of my questions should have been, can I do this (drop text in,
>then outline it) in CT? I will need to be able to for my project.

There would be a number of options to do this in CT. 1) You could keep your notes in a single long topic (the original imported Word doc) and use the headings markup to overlay an outline, which can be viewed in the Table of Contents pane. 2) You could use the aforementioned “cut to new topic” to move selected sections to new topics, and then view the relationship between the original topic and the newly linked topics in the Navigator pane. 2) You could also create a new meta-outline in the Outline pane, by dragging and dropping the newly cut-away topics into a new hierarchy in the .cto outline.

>As to the outline window in CT - I cannot close it. I hit the x and it
>just pops up the save message; will not close. And I cannot open a new
>outline - pops up the save message again. But, once I find what I’m
>doing wrong with that, i

Not quite sure what you’re trying to do. You should certainly be able to close the Outline pane altogether after saving whatever outline you have open.

>t sounds as though you’re saying I cannot have
>more than one outline window open at once in CT. Hmm.

You can only have two (.cto) outlines open at a time: the Outline pane, and the Project Outline pane. I get around this restriction by exporting the outlines as OPML files and viewing them in Natara Bonsai instead.

>Ok, that gets me to another requirement for my project: I want to have a
>number of snippets open on the desktop, shuffle them around, stack them
>up, snip and move text from one to another, gather them and slap them
>all into an outline for further massaging. I’d prefer each window, each
>snippet have outline capability, but can do without that if I can
>manipulate snippets freely. (Gingko?)

CT might not be the most flexible or fastest tool for this. Have you checked whether you have MS OneNote installed? People sometimes don’t realise it’s installed as part of their MS Office suite.

>Do any of the other apps you suggested (Zim, Wikidpad, TheBrain,
>Piggydb, MS OneNote, myBase or UltraRecall) have good clean outline and
>snippet manipulation capabilities?

I don’t really use any of them. For rearranging lot of snippets into an outline I tend to use Outline 4D’s (aka StoryView) outline view. For a free option you could try Noteliner.