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transclusion outlining

AmontilladoAmontillado
in Writing

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.

Comments

  • GeoEng51GeoEng51

    @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..."

  • AndyAndy

    I don't use Markdown previewers, but I imagine that you could use a preprocessing script to transform the Markdown (i.e. to do the transclusions) before sending it to the previewer.

    I can also imagine doing the Markdown preview without a dedicated Markdown previewer app, instead using Pandoc, a Pandoc filter, and automatic updating to a web browser using markmon or something like markmon. (I learned about markmon long ago from a blog post: "Using Scrivener as a pandoc editor/previewer".)

    I haven't tested either of these options, so I'm only suggesting possibilities.

  • harrharr

    Obsidian should work. You can edit files with external editors while Obsidian is open. Obsidian's preview should update automatically. I haven't tried it with The Archive, but I do it regularly with CotEditor.

  • harrharr
    edited 6:25PM

    Example (with some custom CSS). Source:

    Reading view:

  • harrharr
    edited 6:41PM

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

    I haven't tried it, but you should be able to use the same folder with The Archive and Obsidian.

    Disclaimer: Beware of sync conflicts, when you're editing the same file in both apps and/or automatically sync the folder with a cloud service.

  • AmontilladoAmontillado

    Thank you, @GeoEng51 - good information.

    I've used Devonthink as a two pane outliner, which solves note indentation by default. Notes are separate documents. It's the topics in the file list that are indented.

    Of course, a Devonthink document doesn't have sub-documents. I adopted the convention of entering a topic as a regular markdown document. If a topic needed sub-topics I made it a group (folder) and assumed the first document in the group was the topic note.

    There are measures to take to preserve the order of groups and documents when syncing to a second machine.

    If all that sounds like too much trouble, it's really not. It's just part of using a tool for unintended purposes.

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