A useful property of 2-pane PIMs

Posted by Jiggernaut
Feb 21, 2008 at 08:48 PM

The third approaches that Chris delineates (single pane outliners with an adjunct view showing major headings/topics) is exactly what I have been searching for, with no success, for quite some time. Word 2003 has this in a way with the “Document Map” pane, but I it lacking in many regards.

Does anyone now of a program that will allow you to do what Chris describes: essentially a flat-out line as the main pane and a second pain that automatically creates a table of contents/heading list on the other pane so that you can quickly jump from heading to heading within the outline?

Chris Thompson wrote:
>I’d argue the opposite of the consensus in this thread: two pane outliners tend to
>conceal information, making it harder to find. Approaches that I think are useful in
>rediscovering information:
>1) automatic embedded clustering or classifier
>algorithms - i.e. when you’re viewing an item, there’s an area of the screen that
>suggests possibly related items
>2) wiki-like manually created links between
>items
>3) single pane outliners with an adjunct view showing major headings/topics -
>note that this is subtly different from two pane outliners, which require you to click
>through to get to specific topics; there’s at least a chance with single pane
>outliners that you’ll find info by scrolling through it
>4) graphical views - at the
>minimum, thumbnails, though I’ve found that there’s a certain minimum size before
>thumbnails become useful in recognizing information; small icons are useless
> >The
>only thing that’s worse at helping to discover things than two pane outliners are pure
>tag-based systems. Tag clouds help, but they have a tendency to hide the small
>things.
> >—Chris