OT: best FOSS wiki for this classroom scenario?

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 at 16:38, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
>
> Um - I think you are underestimating what I mean by a large-scale
> personal project. Or maybe I am underestimating what Outline View is
> capable of.

It depends. The last time I used it for something serious, I produced
a ~265 page technical product manual from scratch in about 3 months,
entirely done in outline mode from beginning to end, from taking notes
to final layout by applying suitable stylesheets.

With photos, the manual ended up as a >1 GB MS Word file. The
compressed PDF of the end result was about a quarter of that.

> And on that note (heh) we have departed from Ubuntu and thus from this
> forum...

Yes and no. Outliners are a phenomenally powerful and useful tool, if
you know how to use one. They were a common standalone PC/Mac app
category in the 1980s. A notable Mac one was called MORE! which
ultimately grew into a complete presentation package (and thus was
killed off by Powerpoint.) PC ones included PC-Outline and Grandview.

They have almost completely disappeared now and the only modern one I
know is in MS Word.

I've spent a lot of time looking for a FOSS one and failed. This
process did reveal something I'd previously been unaware of, though.
There are 2 conceptually different types of outliners:
one-pane/single-pane/in-line outliners, and 2-pane outliners.

There are a number of FOSS 2-pane outliners, such as TreeLine,
KeepNote, KJots, and TiddlyWiki (which brings us back around). See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TreeLine_(outliner)

These are not the way I work and I find them useless. They give you a
tree structure, with branches ending in leaves. Each "leaf" is a
separate document in which you can put notes. I don't need that -- if
I wanted that, I'd probably just use folders and text files.

The old PC-Outline mode is a single text file, in which paragraphs
have structure. They can go underneath other paragraphs, and you can
collapse levels as you wish, either revealing only high-level headings
and subheadings, or showing the whole structure but with final-level
text hidden, or showing the whole document.

So, for example, in that big manual project, I started out with laying
out the structure of an existing manual from another product from a
different company. Then I copied the file, and changed all the main
section headings to the ones for the product I was describing. Then I
adjusted the subheadings to match the main assemblies and
subcomponents. Then I put in some structure under those: description,
function, disassembly, removal, replacement, reassembly. I duplicated
that across all subcomponents. Then I started adding steps.

In the end I had over 100 pages. To navigate with search or by page
would be impossible, but I could "zoom out" to headings, move to the
chapter I wanted, expand subheadings, and thus zoom in on the
subsection of a subsection of a subsection I wanted.

It's both a structure and a means of navigation. You can edit in the
small, at paragraph level, or at overview level or any point in
between. With a couple of drags you can restructure hundreds of pages
of text while intelligently keeping suitable formatting and so on, and
it makes it very easy to quickly generate tables of contents, indices
etc.

The structure maps _very_ well onto HTML and indeed XML, and could be
useful for all sorts of work, from roughing out web pages to editing
the structure of complex config files. The conceptual model is quite
easy to learn.

I am dismayed there's no decent FOSS one, and I've considered trying
to learn enough Python to write one myself.

I am told "org mode" in EMACS is somewhat similar, but I am not an
Emacs user -- I've tried -- and Org-mode embeds structure in markup in
the document, meaning that it's a file format as well. The advantage
of the one in Word being embedded in Word is that at all times your
document is just a word doc, and can be viewed or opened  in
LibreOffice Writer or whatever, without conversion.

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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