Outlines, Tiered Lists

Scrivener Wish List
1

Hey guys,

I don’t want to come across as a grump-gus, much less a repetitive one; after all, I’ve often and publicly lamented Scrivener’s (or rather, the OS X text system’s) problematic implementation of lists, but I’d like to draw special attention to the area of outlines. I know Scrivener has an Outliner built into it — but that’s for projects and documents, not actual textual outlines within documents. What I mean, of course, is something like this:

I. Outline level 1 text, auto-styled appropriately
A. Outline level 2 text, indented and auto-styled appropriately
B. More outline level 2 text
1. Outline level 3 text, indented and auto-styled appropriately

Currently, Scrivener supports nothing like this; indenting within a numbered list doesn’t indent to a user-specified level, the numbering scheme does not change (or stay consistent) when you indent, and of course, Scrivener cannot “back up” to a previous level based on indentation. Also, there is no way to tell Scrivener to insert a blank line between the items of a list, nor is there are there any built-in “outline styles” of lists, nor for the user to create and save this own list styles in order to make things easier. If you want this functionality, you have to implement it and keep track of it manually, which is a huge pain in the keister. I can understand the logic of using Scrivener to create a basic document and then going into Word or Pages to add the finishing touches, but . . . basic outline-lists aren’t really “finishing touches,” are they? I mean, they’re pretty central to basic document creation and for doing any kind of academic work, or for brainstorming within a document, or for inserting one’s note-taking into a larger project, as well as for breaking down writing goals within a single document, or whatever. Don’t get me wrong — Scrivener is already an impressive feat of engineering, and a marvelous program for most content-generation tasks . . . except this one, which is what’s kind of frustrating.

Me personally, I think this is a feature that needs implementing, like, yesterday :smiley: , and if the OS X text system doesn’t support it, well, there’s custom code in Scrivener for dealing with ordinals, right? Even the most basic implementation would be better than what we have now, which is pretty much nada. It doesn’t strike me as a feature that would be particularly difficult to add, but then, I’m not a developer and don’t have any sense of perspective on what is or isn’t a huge load of pain in that department. All I’m saying is that if we all know that the OS X text system is — to say the least — somewhat limiting (even given its expansive and otherwise impressive feature-set), then why not make this an instance where we reach beyond it in order to add features that Apple (perhaps unwisely :wink: ) left out?

2

Overriding the built-in lists and replacing them with something completely custom is far from a trivial task. In fact, before the OS X text system introduced bulleted lists several years ago, I started to implement my own - and it was hideous. So there are no plans to override it in the near future (not even for 3.0), I’m afraid. Fortunately, not many users find this a problem - although the built-in lists aren’t perfect, they do most of what people want.

I’m not sure what you mean about not being able to number different levels using different numbering systems - this is fairly easy, unless I misunderstand you. It’s even easier if you use the keyboard shortcuts in the Format > List menu for cycling between list styles.

You can also adjust indents for lists using the ruler.

You’re right that there’s no way of adding a line between list items, although for blank lines you can always use paragraph spacing:

Hope that helps.

All the best,
Keith

3

Well, I had no idea it was that thorny of a programming problem. I’m working on creating my own outliner right now, in Java (I know), so many once I’m done, I could share the code with you? Of course, it would have to be recoded in Obj-C, but hey, at least the logic would be there! :smiley:

—A.H.

4

Thanks for this response, Keith. I have a similar query but what I would really like to do is create a list style that works consistently like the heading and text presets I have created.

Is it possible to pre-define a list preset using the list style options as well as the indents and spacing options? For example, I set all my paragraph numbers against the left margin and indent the paragraph text at 0,5cm intervals so a level 1 paragraph is 1cm from the left margin and the number; a level 2 paragraph is 1,5cm from the left margin and so on.

I also break my documents up into sections so I’d like the numbering to run through a compiled document and not restart with each section. One thought I had is that I could switch to Placeholder Tags instead of numbers in a list and see if the numbering doesn’t generate when I compile a document to finish off in LibreOffice or Word.

I’ve looked through the manual but I just see tips on how to do this although I’m probably looking for the wrong terms.

I realise this is a pretty specialised use of the software which it wasn’t really designed for but I am losing so much time messing with Word styles and recovering the odd LibreOffice document that self-destructs that it is worth exploring options deep inside Scrivener. The solution you outlined in your comment looks pretty close to what I want to do. I just want to create presets to automate much of that formatting.