Good Outlining Solutions For OSX?
I write technical non-fiction and find that I cannot write well without first constructing a detailed (10-20 page) outline. Are there any good outlining solutions for OSX? Apps? Templates in Microsoft Word? Etc.
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Am I allowed to beat the drum for Scrivener again? :)
Scrivener is a tremendously flexible writing program which allows you to rearrange your items easily, by dragging around icons, by putting up virtual cards on a corkboard, or setting things up in outline format (the Outline view is right in the top bar). Each item of your outline is a document, which can then be filled in as needed, and moved around if you want.
You can download a completely functional version and test-drive it for 30 days, I think, to see whether you like it.
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I tend to write outlines using emacs and org-mode, because I do technical research that involves a lot of programming, and as a result, I live in emacs. Aquamacs is an emacs port for OS X that's free and has a nice Mac interface you can use instead of many of the Unix-based keyboard shortcuts. Aquamacs comes with org-mode, which is a nice text-based format for outlining and text-folding (so you can hide various parts of your outline). What I like about text-based formats is that it's easy to determine exactly what changes have been made between revisions (hell, if you want to track versions, use a version control system like Mercurial, Git, Subversion, etc.).
The advantages are that it's free, and highly customizable (up to a point). The outlines are exportable to a number of different formats.
The disadvantages are that the workflow tends to be designed for people who are programmers, and work in emacs. There's not much of a GUI to speak of, beyond the toolbar at the top of the screen (and each window). Emacs is written to be a highly flexible text editor, and org-mode is a plug-in; it's not designed to be something like Scrivener, which, as far as I can tell, bundles together all of the tools that they think writers need (and in a cool-looking way). If you want something to keep track of your sources or research, you'd need another program (like Mendeley, for instance, which does a pretty good job of acting as a database for PDFs and media). If you want version control, you need another tool for that. I don't know of anything that corresponds to the "corkboard" functionality. So if you want extra functionality, you need other programs to fill in the gaps.
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I spend a lot of time in Tinderbox ( http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ ) It is a great tool for harvesting information, putting down ideas or any kind of notes. Then, as need arises, to structure this information, discover new relationships and patterns, and finally export it to text or html. It is great for taking notes at lectures and rework them later and for making sense of any problem whith lots of information.
You can jut notes down in map view, where notes look like sticky notes on a windowpane. There is an outline view where notes are viewed as lists. There are also several other views. You can make Tinderbox do many things for you – agents are notes that collect aliases of notes based on your chosen criteria. All in all, you can do a lot in Tinderbox. I find it is ideal for when you want to take notes, research, and when you want to think what you have researched into something good.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5087. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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