An Outliner or a Word Processor? (It was There We Go!)

[Mark Smith]

Georges Kormikiaris wrote:

>On 10 de dez de 2004, at 16:24, Mark Smith wrote:
>
>> Some felt, that there was an underlying issue with OO in that it lacks 
>> a model of clear separation between structure and content. The "note" 
>> is the obvious level at which this separation *could* be made. In 
>> short, all of your structure would go into the "normal" outliner nodes 
>> and all of your content would go into your notes.
>
>So maybe it has a way of implementing the separation you're asking for?
>
>> There are obvious, serious limitations with the app as it stands here. 
>> Omni would need efffectively to replicate a lot of the outliner 
>> functionality inside the notes.
>
>Why? If it is content there (notes) and it is separated from the 
>strucuture (where the outliner functions should operate), why would you 
>need to implement outliner functionality within content (notes)?

Georges already contacted me off-list about this and my response was that this will work as long as your content is restricted to plain text. If you wish anything else to be considered as content, the current model in OO won't support the separation with notes. I'll need to look into the possibilities afforded by a pop-up list column and XSL and/or have a long hard think about how much of a cludge it would be to fake it with named styles.

>The way I see it, transforming an outliner in a word processor would be 
>a bad idea. An outliner should give me the ability to concentrate on 
>initial ideas and to put those initial somewhat loose ideas into 
>perspective through an organized structure, after that I can move on to 
>my favorite word processor. Nirvana would be reached when OO can easily 
>integrate with "put your favorite word processor here" and things could 
>move back and forth smoothly, whenever you need to concentrate on the 
>structure (in order to change it, grow it, etc).

"Round-tripping" of this sort would be nice. I don't need it with a word processor (virtually never use one) and its never going to work with LaTeX, but, I agree, that in principle, its an excellent goal.

mark.