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List:       lyx-devel
Subject:    LyX Outliner and Corkboard - Feature Proposal
From:       "Rob Oakes" <lyx-devel () oak-tree ! us>
Date:       2009-03-05 4:57:01
Message-ID: 00d701c99d4e$d31be380$7953aa80$ () us
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Dear Jürgen and other LyX Developers,

Thank you very much for the kind welcome.  Pursuant to your advice, I have 
gone through and tried to develop my thoughts on a few features that I would 
be excited to develop and add to LyX.  Because of dummy-layouts and a few 
other graphics I wasn't able to send it via e-mail. However, you can find 
the full proposal at:

http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/03/04/perfect-tool

or a PDF version at:

http://www.oak-tree.us/stuff/LyX-Proposal.pdf

Here's a quick summary: LyX is one of the easiest and best ways to leverage 
the power of LaTeX.  Unfortunately, most of its features are geared document 
preparation.  It would be wonderful if LyX included a robust outliner or 
more visual way to interact with the structure of the document (though the 
outline view in the 1.6 series is an excellent start).  Scrivener, a program 
for Mac OS X (http://www.literatureandlatte.com) and Semantik 
(http://www.freehackers.org/~tnagy/kdissert.html) includes such tools.

The most important features of the expanded outline system would be:

1.) Easy rearrangement (drag and drop) of outline items.
2.) Inclusion of a summary field (which is not part of the document text) 
and allows for graphical manipulation of the document.
3.) Ties between the outline items and blocks of text in the draft.
4.) Outline data would remain as part of the original LyX document, it would 
not be exported into other document types (LaTeX, HTML, etc.)

While none of these ideas are original, my thinking has congealed increasing 
frustrated with the aforementioned Scrivener.  While its creative tools are 
wonderful, the word processor is too underpowered to be of much practical 
use.  Without a fully featured word processor, the outliner and corkboard 
are just nifty gimmicks.

Yet, they are extremely useful gimmicks.  As someone who spends more than 
50% of his productive hours writing grants, papers, or proposals; I can say 
that a robust outliner and visual system for interacting with the structure 
of complex documents would greatly simplify many of my daily routine.  I was 
able to get a rather substantial outline for a book completed in Scrivener, 
before needing to move it to LyX.  I would have greatly preferred to work 
exclusively from LyX.

Does anyone have additional thoughts or ideas how the technical 
implementation might look?  Are there currently plans to implement such a 
system?  Have similar features been discussed and dismissed in the past as 
being unrealistic or impractical?

Cheers,

Rob Oakes


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