vimoutliner and bulleting/numbering
James Miller <gajs-f0el <at> dea.spamcon.org>
2011-11-02 15:58:33 GMT
Hello all. I had a little trouble joining this list and so, having found
Steve Litt's e-mail address, exchanged a couple of e-mails with him about
the issues I will address below. It seemed that he might even have been
entertaining the idea of putting together some sort of conversion utility
geared toward my needs--which would be wonderful, since doing something
like that is far beyond my competence. But I haven't heard back from him
on that for a couple of days, so perhaps I misunderstood him. In any case,
the following.
I've tried vim a few times during the years I've struggled to learn to use
GNU/Linux. It was never very successful, in part, because I couldn't see
how it was at all suited to my needs (academic writing in the humanities,
for which WYSIWYG word processors seem to have been created). But as I've
begun writing out lecture notes--being very displeased with Open/Libre
Office's outlining functionality for that purpose and in search for
something less resource-intensive--I came across VimOutliner, and now I
finally see a really good use for vim in my work.
My experiments this time with vim and VO are going more smoothly. VO seems
to hold great promise as a tool for creating my lecture notes, which take
the form of an outline: VO seems a great way to record and organize the
thoughts and ideas that go into my lectures. But my lecture notes, once
created, need to be useful outside my computer's hard drive as well:
namely, they must be printed and taken to the lecture hall, where I can
use them for reference during my lecture. And, as good as VO is for the
process of recording and organizing thoughts, it is not good at all as a
tool for getting the recorded and organized thought into a printed
document useful at the podium.
For the notes to be useful as a document at the podium, several changes
from the form the VO outline takes on the screen are needed: the font
needs to be enlarged (14 pt. is about right for my aging eyes),
line-spacing needs to be about 1.5, the document should have a header,
there should be page numbering, and there should be bullets or numbering
at the various levels of the outline (to act as visual cues and reference
points). VO cannot, of course, do any of this.
Steve mentioned LaTeX as a good tool for introducing such things, and,
having experimented a little with LaTeX, I'm aware it can do this and that
the output looks very nice. As to how to make the VO file import into
LaTeX without having manually to introduce all the necessary mark-up,
well, I'm at a loss.
I did manage to get a good portion of the way toward the printed form I
need by using another program, though. I discovered that .otl files import
fine into Libre Writer, and from there, it is a very simple matter to
enlarge the font and add a header and page numbering. The one thing that
Writer cannot, apparently, help me to do, though, is to insert bullets or
numbering: that would all, so far as I can tell, have to be done manually.
So, my question to the list at this point is whether there has already
been developed, or might be developed by someone with the requisite
technical skills, a way to insert bullets or numbering into the outline
that has been created in VO? Ideally those bullets or numbering would vary
according to the level of outline headings. But at this point, I think I
would be satisfied even with the same type of bullet at every level: that
would be better than no bullets at all.
I should mention in closing that, before Steve realized my lack of ability
with programming, he suggested the following as a way to insert bullets:
"Bullets are trivial -- if a line begins with anything but a colon or
whitespace then a colon, prepend an asterisk and a star to the line's
first non-blank. I think you could even do it within VimOutliner with a
command such as this:
:g!/\s*:/s/^(\s+)/\1* "
That line of symbols means nothing to me, but since I do have sufficient
competence to copy and paste (in fact, this is one of my key areas of
expertise when it comes to computing), I pasted that string into vim while
viewing a test document in command mode. But it did nothing.
With respect to that string of characters, then, I need to ask whether I
utilized it properly, or whether there might be some mistake there? Does
it seem to others that this might offer a way of inserting bullets into a
VO outline--most probably one and the same bullet symbol for all headline
levels? As I said, the same bullet symbol at all levels, while less
desirable than differing bullet symbols at differing levels, is
nonetheless preferable to no bullets at all.
Any help with this bulleting/numbering query will be highly appreciated.
Thanks,
James
I was trying to get Vim-outliner to work on my main os (Crunchbang
Statler) too, and found this is by far the easiest way.
Happy New Year wishes to all
Ludo
> On debian testing I installed vim-vimoutliner and vim-addon-manager, ran
> % vim-addons install vimoutliner
> restarted gvim, and vimoutliner just worked. I had already updated my .vimrc
> to add
> filetype plugin on
> for other reasons.
>
> --
> Eric Krohn
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