outliner software wanted: single outline with arbitrary lines marked as nodes for an overview

Posted by Lucas
Sep 11, 2016 at 04:29 PM

Hi Thomas,

Welcome to the forum. I think your question is a good one, and I have tried to do similar things. Here are some possible solutions off the top of my head:

1. You could achieve the desired result using Microsoft Word, although the solution is a bit geeky. You could write an outline in a normal (non-outline) view, simply using indentation or bullets. Then, you would give a special “Style” to the lines that have asterisks in your example, and that style would have a corresponding outline level (that shows up in Outline View). So, when you switch over to Outline View, you would be able to view only the lines with asterisks, and the indentation would be according to their Style-based outline level as opposed to their visible indent level in normal view. (What I have just said may or may not make sense, depending on your familiarity with Microsoft Word.) The downside to this solution is that you can’t collapse/expand the nodes of the full outline—- you would only be able to collapse/expand the asterisked nodes.

2. You could use InfoQube and then use filters (or use some other outlining system that supports filtering). If you take some time to master InfoQube, I’m sure you could create a workable filtering system, such as simply filtering to only show lines that end in an asterisk. This would probably be the most powerful solution.

3. I think you could probably achieve the desired result using folding in some text editors. There are different types of folding available, but I believe some text editors support arbitrary folding, whereby you could manually fold each group of lines that begins with an asterisked line.

4. Perhaps you could use Org Mode, in such a way that you would create our basic outline using tabs, but then you would add preceding asterisks (or double or triple asterisks) for the lines you want to highlight. (I’m not sure about this, as I don’t currently have Org Mode installed.)

5. FWIW, on a Mac you could do something similar in Tinderbox (my current favorite), except that the asterisked lines wouldn’t be collected in a hierarchical way, but simply as a flat list.

Anyway, I hope that helps.

Good luck,

Lucas