[TxMt] TM as outliner?

[Eric Hsu]

I love outliners. I use OmniOutliner all the time (and used TAO before that).

I do sometimes use TM for a quick and dirty outline, just using tabs 
to mark levels. I wrote a bundle "Outliners" which exports a simple 
tab outline into various formats (HTML, Markdown, OPML, LaTeX... I 
forget what else) which is in the svn repository.

TM is not out of the box ready for outlining, but it has almost all 
of the needed functionality.

1. Folding could allow collapsing of outline pieces. I didn't follow 
the latest changes to folding technology, but it's possible that 
commands can either presently or in the future control folding so one 
could fold all items at a certain level.

2. Lines beginning with different tabs could be scoped as different 
levels and hence one could adjust the style sheet so lines began with 
bullets, etc. If the levels were defined in a nested way, i.e. 
outline.1, outline.1.1, etc., then I believe styles would even be 
inherited by sublevels cleanly.

3. Numbering could be done on a refresh basis, but I'm not sure it 
could be done live.

4. The big issue here is that there isn't currently a way for tabbed 
lines to be indented (i.e. lines always wrap to column 1). This is on 
Allan's To Do.

5. Commands to move bullets around the hierarchy seem straightforward 
to do, but would probably need to parse the whole document and would 
slow down with very large outlines. But I believe this would be very 
acceptable for 99% of documents.

6. Cloning seems much harder to do. Multiple columns seem like 
technically not an issue (tab delimiters), but likely a formatting 
disaster.

best wishes, Eric
-- 
Eric Hsu, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
San Francisco State University
erichsu at math.sfsu.edu
http://math.sfsu.edu/hsu