Hierarchical outliner with the most complete writing tools?

Posted by CRC
Jun 14, 2009 at 01:11 PM

Hi Folks:

I’m going to flog one of my favorite topics, Styles. All of the outliners I have ever used (and I’ve used many) that have a way to transfer information to Word do not use styles. Some, like the former IdeaMason use headline style, but none of them style paragraphs and characters. They all use the lazy approach of just sending over the rich text.

The closest I’ve found for a style based editor is LyX which is TeX based.

The bottom line is that combining the structure of an outliner (I actually use each outline entry as a paragraph, or bullet item, or numbered list item, etc.) along with paragraph and character styles which result in a document that, when transferred to Word, can still be edited in a reasonable fashion (necessary when collaborating on documents) would be the ideal for me. I’ve built some of my own tools in this space (with something like NoteMap as the base - and when the outline item is just a paragraph you don’t have the overflow problem described above - and my own text based coding scheme), but having real tools that are outline and style based would be my holy grail.

Thanks.

Charles