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List:       lyx-devel
Subject:    Re: LyX Outliner and Corkboard - Feature Proposal
From:       Helge Hafting <helge.hafting () hist ! no>
Date:       2009-03-05 10:42:13
Message-ID: 49AFAC85.1080907 () hist ! no
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Rob Oakes wrote:
> 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
> 
Interesting.

> 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.
Shouldn't be too hard to add. Movement of items is supported, all you
need is user-friendly dragging.

> 2.) Inclusion of a summary field (which is not part of the document text) 
> and allows for graphical manipulation of the document.
While not part of the document, I think it ought to be stored in the 
document file. Similiar to note insets.

> 3.) Ties between the outline items and blocks of text in the draft.
The current outliner is perfectly tied because it is the document text 
you see. The outliner is not stored in the document or anywhere else, it 
  is displayed directly from document data. The obvious advantage is 
that it cannot possibly get "out of sync" with the document - there 
being nothing to "keep up to date".

Your summary field would have to be tied in somehow. I think it should 
be stored as an attribute of whatever section/chapter/part it belongs 
to. That way, all the existing ways of moving stuff around (including 
such things as cut&paste of whole chapters) will work for summary stuff 
too. Of course the summary don't have to show in the main window, it can 
be a outline-only thing.

> 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?

Nothing has been dismissed; the existing outliner is popular, and 
further improvements are possible. The biggest problem is probably that 
someone has to do the job.

Helge Hafting
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