Outlining in Mellel, revisited

[Amontillado]

I revisited a Mellel outlining technique today and thought I would share.

My favorite outlining style is more like text-based storyboarding than a Harvard hierarchy. Notes on virtual index cards.

I made an Outline style set with two levels of Auto-title. One Auto-title is called Topic, the other one is Subtopic.

The Topic Auto-title is prefixed with a page break. When I insert a new Topic Auto-title, I get a blank page. That helps with the perception of starting a section as a fresh thing.

The Subtopic Auto-title is organizational. It doesn't insert a new page. It's a heading in the text and it puts an entry in Mellel's outline pane. Additional sublevels might help, although I like to keep my outlines fairly flat.

Mellel becomes a two pane outliner. I have my document headings in Mellel's Outline. In the document itself, I can write a summary paragraph of what I want to say and maybe follow that with a bullet list of points I want to make. Drag and drop reordering works great, and automatically inserted page breaks appear and disappear as an Auto-title is promoted and demoted.

It's also handy to write a note-to-self in a right justified text box. When I no longer need the note, the text box can be deleted as a unit.

Additional Topic sections per character and location would let me use cross references for quick access to notes. I say "would" because I haven't got anything that involved. The possibility is intriguing.

I was an OmniOutliner fan until my Mac became too old to run it and OmniGroup's support for OmniOutliner appeared lukewarm.

Bike is an intriguing outliner. Curio is the king of brainstorming tools.

Outlining in the same tool I use for writing is nice. I'm fickle in some of my tastes. Right now, I'm getting a lot of mileage out of Mellel as an outliner.

[ealvarez]

Thanks for sharing your experience! : )

[Moises Zumaeta]

Amontillado, would you be kind enough to share the outline set (or a template) of this outline. I am sure that many of us here would be greatly benefited from this!

Thanks!

[Amontillado]

You betcha, happy to help. My outline styles are simplistic and you won't offend me in the least if you find better ways to outline. I'd like to learn.

By the way, sharing a template illustrates some of the power of Mellel's styles and why I crave them.

My Outline template used a global style set. That way as I see changes I want to make to my Outline style set, I can make them in any document and they apply to every existing document using that style set.

When you open the template, you'll see the Outline styles as a local (diamond) style set. I have my global style yet you can use it without effort and it stays local to the document - unless you click the "globalize" button in the style set editor, then it becomes global on your system.

Experimenting with a global style set is possible, too. Open the style set editor and duplicate the style you want to monkey around with. Now use the "Styles" pulldown menu to select the new copy of your style set. To keep your inventory of global styles from getting cluttered, delete the new style.

The style set is deleted from the global list but remains in force as a local style in your document. If you later decide you want your experimental style set to become global, the globalize button in the style set editor will do that.

A template with my Outline style set can be found on dropbox at https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yhe9x2bl ... bryx6&dl=0. Click the download arrow in the upper right to download the .meltem file. Dropbox will let you see the contents of the template because it's a zip file with a meltem extension. For use with Mellel, download the .meltem file as a single unit.

The auto-titles are set up to be prefaced with a page break. That makes the experience a little more like a two-pane outliner with the Mellel Outline pane open (Shift-Command-O).

To stay true to my inner cybersecurity professional I have to urge caution when clicking links. Hunt for other posts by me and verify for yourself I'm a legitimate Mellel enthusiast. If there's a better way to share files here, I'm all ears.

Please let me know how this outline setup can be improved.