Content Structuring on a desktop

[Art Campbell]

Have you looked at Silicon Prairie's tool?
http://www.siliconprairiesoftware.com/Products.html  There may be
others out there, too.

But, unless you're REALLY in love with outlines... I've found that I
can usually do as much as I need to do with my own outline template. I
set it up with tags that correspond to my regular publishing template,
so if I call something a H1 in the outline, it maps to H1 in the text
file. You could either build your own from scratch or start with the
FM outline template.

Beyond that, if you use the outline for writing or note-taking, I
usually use conditional text to hide or show anything besides the
topic levels.

If you want to get cute, you can use the outline template for a whole
series of files that will map to your chapters, and import them as
text insets into a container file.

When you want to convert the outline files to working chapters, just
import formats from your text template file to copies of your outline,
and you're done.

Art Campbell
               art.campbell at gmail.com
  "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52
Vincent and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
                                                      No disclaimers apply.
                                                               DoD 358



On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Dr Rick Smith <rick at cryptosmith.com> wrote:
> I wrote my first two books by creating huge outlines in ThinkTank or
> MORE, and importing them into Framemaker. The last book was published
> in 2001 using Frame 5 or a Mac (grumble grumble). The MORE-to-Frame
> conversion created five levels of headings which became chapters,
> sections, subsections, on down to some bulleted lists. At the leaf
> level I could include a summary paragraph that I'd use as a starting
> point for the real writing.
>
> I'm halfway through a new project (just converted from Frame 7 to 9)
> and I miss the old flexibility. The current crop of outliners are
> garbage. The MS Word outline format doesn't seem to bring format tags
> into Frame, so you lose the hierarchy. The only outlining tool that is
> close to MORE is a now-unsupported screenwriting tool. And its import
> ability makes it nearly useless, too.
>
> I know how to build a structured document in Frame, but I see no no
> easy way to work with structure pieces at a macro level, like "Move
> section 3.2 to under 5.3" except by selecting and moving multi-page
> chunks of text.
>
> I've read about DITA and I'd love to use a database to store chunks of
> the document (that's how I think) but these solutions seem to require
> server-level implementations or unexplained bits of additional software.
>
> Rick Smith
> http://www.cryptosmith.com/
>
>
>
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