zim-wiki team mailing list archive

["Ulf Bro" <ulf.bro@xxxxxx>]

I find Zim very useful for saving a lot of data in my everyday situation at 
work. There are a lot of things to keep in written form somewhere like "when 
the customer wants this and that, then have him fill this form and call that 
telephone number at these particular weekdays and hours" or "these things 
are ordered by this or that company, ordering is sent by fax at Mrs. so and 
so". Thousands of small details, my data base is growing all the time. One 
namespace is enough for that.

Now there is one additional feature which could be added to zim with only 
minor programming.

If someone is writing a book and just starts to write the book not from the 
beginning but in the middle then he at some time will determine that his 
work has now grown to a size that he has to split it in two chapters.

Sooner or later he has 5 chapters and some of the things in chapter 2 really 
belongs in chapter 4 and have to be moved. Then chapter 4 must be split in 3 
sections, 4.1, 4.2 ,nd 4.3. Et cetera.

For such purposes you normally use an "outline editor".

Now Zim can do some of that too. You can make pages and sub-pages and move 
them around like you want to. You can link them to each other or not link 
them as you like.

Just one thing you can't do is to change the order of files appearing in the 
same namespace (physically they are files in the same folder). They always 
appear in alphabetical order. If Zim were to be changed so that pages can be 
swapped (and thus appear in another order in the index file) then Zim would 
actually be an outline editor. We would then just need a function to export 
everything into one big text file, or one big html file, that's all. It 
would't be difficult to program.

This means you could write a complete book without linking any files at all 
(if you want). Or link as many as you want.

There are other outliners out there but they aren't particularly good at 
cross linking and updating links when pages are moved.

Ulf