transclusion outlining

Amontillado

I'm a proponent of outlining even though I really don't like - loathe, actually - Harvard style outlines.

My kind of outline is backed by a database of facts. A Zettelkasten of factual items without dependency on any particular narrative order plus a list in story order.

The story points in the outline link to facts or tagged groups of facts in the Zettelkasten.

In this way there is a single point of truth for facts appearing in multiple outline topics.

As much as I don't like Harvard outlines, I do like modest indentation. One or maybe two sublevels helps me see subdivisions in my writing like chapters and scenes.

The Archive streaming to Marked is very cool. There is a limitation in Marked that bugs me.

Imagine an outline in a Markdown note in The Archive, built with an indented list.

I can transclude a document, but Marked will only recognize the transclusion if there is no leading space before the {{transcluded file here.md}} placeholder.

That breaks the list's indentation.

However, if I edit the Markdown note in iaWriter and use its content block syntax, any leading space on the line will indent the transclusion.

My Markdown source looks like:

- a dark and stormy night
  /weatherscience.md
   - more troubles with tribbles
     /startrek.md

Rendered in iaWriter's preview I get the topic "a dark and stormy night" with an indented note from my weatherscience.md file.

The subtopic "more troubles with tribbles" has a properly indented note under it with my Star Trek notes.

For this to work, the archive directory has to be added to iaWriter as a location. That's not too big a deal. You can add and delete locations at will in iaWriter.

iaWriter has always been quirky for me. In this case, the overall plan works but the list entry following a note gets highlighted in gray.

Can anyone recommend a previewer that would handle indented transclusions?

As an aside, it is very cool that The Archive doesn't block use of its content by other applications.

GeoEng51

@Amontillado

Your post reminded me of past discussions about using outlining to assist in organizing notes and creating zettels. Following are links to some sporadic discussions on that topic. They only address your question peripherally, but hopefully they are still helpful.

Indenting without changing text to a code block The entire post has some interesting information

Using Logseq as an outliner In particular, see the second response in the post, where I'm discussing the use of outlining

Philosophy of using an outliner to organize, reorganize and split notes into separate zettels I'm referring specifically to my third and longest comment in this post, starting "There are a few features that I really like about Logseq..."