zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[mowestusa <mowestusa@xxxxxxxxx>]

I may be missing a point that is being made in this feature request, but couldn't you do something similar with just simple renaming of sub-pages since ZIM will rename the links for you if you did link pages.

For example, your book starts as a single file under a name space:

(Namespace) Great Novel
(sub-page) book body

Realize that your writing has turned into chapters:

(Namespace) Great Novel
(sub-page) Chapter 1
(sub-page) Chapter 4

Realize that things need to be broken up more:

(Namespace) Great Novel
(sub-page) 01 Chapter
(sub-page) 02 Chapter
(sub-page) 04.01 Chapter
(sub-page) 04.02 Chapter
(sub-page) 04.03 Chapter

I mention this because I use a similar system to track all of my open projects. Most of my projects have a date (like meeting prep) or a month in which they need to be completed. So I name all of my projects using date codes that automatically reshuffle and stay in chronological order.

(Namespace) Projects
(sub-page) 2012-03-01 Faculty Meeting

(sub-page) 2012-04 Open House Follow-Up

If a date gets changed for a meeting, I simply change the date, and it reshuffles the projects so that it is always in chronological order.
 
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| Steve |
| mowestusa@xxxxxxxxx      |
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________________________________
 From: Ulf Bro <ulf.bro@xxxxxx>
To: zim-wiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2012 3:01 AM
Subject: [Zim-wiki] Feature suggestion - outliner
 
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 

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