New ways of using outline view in individual documents?

[shivohum]

So I ran across this interesting post from 2017. Gregory asked about making outliner-style hierarchies for the paragraphs within a document:

…[in my academic work] the individual documents that make up my overall argument also have to be organised and logically coherent… [so I] compose my paragraphs with a very clear logical structure. The aim is for the outline to be my finished text, only requiring me to change its formatting from outline to a series of finished paragraphs…[I wish Scrivener would let me] compose my ground-level argument as a structured outline within a single Scrivener document, and then hit a toggle button and it would be formatted as a series of paragraphs. Hit the toggle again, and I would see the outline again, allowing me to make structural changes to my argument with ease. There would have to be some sort of ‘new paragraph’ marker. Perhaps each highest level heading begins a new paragraph, or perhaps a code at the beginning of a line could tell Scrivener to begin a new paragraph. It would also be nice if the heading levels were clearly indicated, perhaps with Harvard numbering, or something that.

AmberV replied with a helpful version of how something similar might be done using the Scrivenings feature, the outliner view, and a switching back and forth between individual document view and outline view using Cmd-1 and Cmd-3.

But another user, gr, chimed into say that this was still not quite it:

What the OP is speaking of is hierachically structured body text. He is not talking about an “outline” in the sense many if us were (rather uselessly taught) in high school – where a node in the outline might be a single word or phrase. Making the latter into document titles so as to “outline” structure them in Scriv makes sense, but doing the same with the former makes no sense at all – and it also would leave you with basically all of your body text in the title field of the docs, not in their bodies. Really does not make good working sense.

Gr suggested his own workarounds, but what I’m wondering is if Scrivener today is any better at addressing this usage scenario.

[kewms]

If you read all the way to the end of the thread you linked, it includes a few additional thoughts based on Scrivener 3’s new features. Beyond that, I would say that the behavior of the program discussed in that thread is essentially unchanged.

Katherine

[shivohum]

@kewms

If you read all the way to the end of the thread you linked, it includes a few additional thoughts based on Scrivener 3’s new features. Beyond that, I would say that the behavior of the program discussed in that thread is essentially unchanged.

Katherine

Thank you. I did notice that if you create a new untitled note and just start typing, it shows the title of the note provisionally as the start of the text of the note itself – at least a paragraph’s worth or so, it seems. I wonder if this could be a sort-of-way in which what the author of that thread wanted could be achieved…