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Outliners, in general. The single most powerful tool available for a long-form writer (in any (human) language.) Equally useful for fact, fiction, academia, do

Outliners, in general. The single most powerful tool available for a long-form writer (in any (human) language.) Equally useful for fact, fiction, academia, documentation, anything. Technologically simple, was done well on MS-DOS in a few hundred kB of code and data. Maps very well onto HTML, XML, etc. As such, maps onto AsciiDoc etc. But forgotten. Almost no modern versions and what exist are almost unbelievably primitive, far far below the capabilities of the mid-1980s -- for example, Emacs OrgMode or LogSeq. Almost too braindead to use. I keep copies of 20-30Y old MS Word binaries around on my 64-bit Linux boxes, just for this.

AstroJetson 1y ago
Can you say more about outlines in older versions of word? I use Word2019 (local install) and it works for me. What am I missing?
- lproven 1y ago
  If you are happy with the ribbon UI, then you are fine. Personally, I can't stand it. So I use either Word 97, which has everything I need and a nicely minimal UI, and uses the same file formats as Office into the 21st century, or Word 2003. Example (old) screenshot: https://imgur.com/gallery/word-97-word-2003-under-wine-on-ubuntu-AgKGOuS https://imgur.com/gallery/word-97-word-2003-under-wine-on-ub... Note that in 97 I've turned off everything. No ribbon, no ruler, no toolbars, just menus and scroll bars, and I normally turn off the horizontal scrollbar too. In Word 2003 I've left some of the clutter turned on so you can see the difference: the ruler and one toolbar. Word 97 can't handle big portrait screens, for instance.
dialup_sounds 1y ago
Second! Outliners are a very underserved space, eclipsed by overwrought note apps that treat outlining as formatting rather than a fundamental tool for organizing thought and communication. Indigrid (https://innovationdilation.com/ https://innovationdilation.com/) was extremely promising but is presumed dead. Bike on Mac (https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/ https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/) is probably the best living example. ...and there's not much else.
- treetalker 1y ago
  I broke down and bought Bike. I use it almost exclusively for drafting complex legal briefs: I like that it makes it easy to make any node at any level a heading. Its system of changing the format of nodes (to heading, body text, checkbox, unordered or ordered list, etc.) is fast, easy, and unique in the space. But printing leaves much to be desired. Otherwise I end up using OmniOutliner. The filtering can be useful (and it's a feature not really available elsewhere) but often OmniOutliner can feel slow and overly feature-heavy. Printing is also not great.
  - swah 1y ago
    Just tried Bike again - reminded I need image pasting on those apps to "run my workflows" (work notes) properly. So mostly Logseq if I want local images...
cagey 1y ago
> Technologically simple, was done well on MS-DOS in a few hundred kB of code and data. Exactly. The outliner feature in Borland's Sidekick Plus was my all-time favorite, but its lifetime was brief (due to the entire product being a TSR), so I used Symantec's Grandview 2.0 sporadically over the decades, even in DOSbox out of desperation (as recently as 5-6 years ago!).
john-tells-all 1y ago
I've had good luck with (service) Workflowy -- https://workflowy.com/ https://workflowy.com/ Type to create items at different levels. Drag and drop to rearrange. Click triangle to fold.
- lproven 1y ago
  I am not a big fan of web apps, but this looks like it fits the org-mode use pattern of to-do lists and so on. But there's no integration with formatting, stylesheets, or anything, right? In 2017 or so I wrote the maintenance manual for an earlier version of this educational 3D printer: https://www.ysoft.com/be3d https://www.ysoft.com/be3d It was about 350 pages with lots of illustrations and diagrams. The entire manual was a single giant Word outline. That meant all the headings, subheadings, sub-sub-headings etc. were automatically formatted for me, plus automatic generation of table of contents and index, all automatically linked to the structure of the steps in each chapter. The first edition took me about 6-8 weeks, the second edition under a month. Later on I spent 4 years working with DocBook XML and a professional documentation production system -- but I can state from personal experience that for a solo project, me and 1 engineer, Word in Outline Mode was vastly more productive and efficient. To the client's amazement, the final stage of print-ready layout took part of one morning at the end. I took one of their leaflets, laid out in Word, removed all the text leaving only styles, and then merged that stylesheet with the manual. Bingo, fully-formatted document, in corporate colours and fonts, with headers and footers and so on. Just a little layout tweaking, adding some page breaks and things. The ability to collapse all the levels down to just headings is an amazing navigation tool: it's like zooming out to an overview, then zooming back in somewhere else, while the text remains readable throughout.
Irongirl1 1y ago
FYI: found this while searching for dtp programs that maybe didn't suck...and it seems wonderful. I'm still searching for a book topic, but I thought I would share it here if it helps anyone http://pollenpub.com http://pollenpub.com

AstroJetson 1y ago

Can you say more about outlines in older versions of word? I use Word2019 (local install) and it works for me. What am I missing?

lproven 1y ago
If you are happy with the ribbon UI, then you are fine. Personally, I can't stand it. So I use either Word 97, which has everything I need and a nicely minimal UI, and uses the same file formats as Office into the 21st century, or Word 2003. Example (old) screenshot: https://imgur.com/gallery/word-97-word-2003-under-wine-on-ubuntu-AgKGOuS https://imgur.com/gallery/word-97-word-2003-under-wine-on-ub... Note that in 97 I've turned off everything. No ribbon, no ruler, no toolbars, just menus and scroll bars, and I normally turn off the horizontal scrollbar too. In Word 2003 I've left some of the clutter turned on so you can see the difference: the ruler and one toolbar. Word 97 can't handle big portrait screens, for instance.

dialup_sounds 1y ago

Second! Outliners are a very underserved space, eclipsed by overwrought note apps that treat outlining as formatting rather than a fundamental tool for organizing thought and communication. Indigrid (https://innovationdilation.com/ https://innovationdilation.com/) was extremely promising but is presumed dead. Bike on Mac (https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/ https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/) is probably the best living example. ...and there's not much else.

treetalker 1y ago
I broke down and bought Bike. I use it almost exclusively for drafting complex legal briefs: I like that it makes it easy to make any node at any level a heading. Its system of changing the format of nodes (to heading, body text, checkbox, unordered or ordered list, etc.) is fast, easy, and unique in the space. But printing leaves much to be desired. Otherwise I end up using OmniOutliner. The filtering can be useful (and it's a feature not really available elsewhere) but often OmniOutliner can feel slow and overly feature-heavy. Printing is also not great.
- swah 1y ago
  Just tried Bike again - reminded I need image pasting on those apps to "run my workflows" (work notes) properly. So mostly Logseq if I want local images...

cagey 1y ago

> Technologically simple, was done well on MS-DOS in a few hundred kB of code and data. Exactly. The outliner feature in Borland's Sidekick Plus was my all-time favorite, but its lifetime was brief (due to the entire product being a TSR), so I used Symantec's Grandview 2.0 sporadically over the decades, even in DOSbox out of desperation (as recently as 5-6 years ago!).

john-tells-all 1y ago

I've had good luck with (service) Workflowy -- https://workflowy.com/ https://workflowy.com/ Type to create items at different levels. Drag and drop to rearrange. Click triangle to fold.

lproven 1y ago
I am not a big fan of web apps, but this looks like it fits the org-mode use pattern of to-do lists and so on. But there's no integration with formatting, stylesheets, or anything, right? In 2017 or so I wrote the maintenance manual for an earlier version of this educational 3D printer: https://www.ysoft.com/be3d https://www.ysoft.com/be3d It was about 350 pages with lots of illustrations and diagrams. The entire manual was a single giant Word outline. That meant all the headings, subheadings, sub-sub-headings etc. were automatically formatted for me, plus automatic generation of table of contents and index, all automatically linked to the structure of the steps in each chapter. The first edition took me about 6-8 weeks, the second edition under a month. Later on I spent 4 years working with DocBook XML and a professional documentation production system -- but I can state from personal experience that for a solo project, me and 1 engineer, Word in Outline Mode was vastly more productive and efficient. To the client's amazement, the final stage of print-ready layout took part of one morning at the end. I took one of their leaflets, laid out in Word, removed all the text leaving only styles, and then merged that stylesheet with the manual. Bingo, fully-formatted document, in corporate colours and fonts, with headers and footers and so on. Just a little layout tweaking, adding some page breaks and things. The ability to collapse all the levels down to just headings is an amazing navigation tool: it's like zooming out to an overview, then zooming back in somewhere else, while the text remains readable throughout.

Irongirl1 1y ago

FYI: found this while searching for dtp programs that maybe didn't suck...and it seems wonderful. I'm still searching for a book topic, but I thought I would share it here if it helps anyone http://pollenpub.com http://pollenpub.com