

ARCOutline is a simple Text Outliner along the lines of the one
featured in the October 1988 Acorn User by Joe Telford (although there
is none of Joe's code in there!). An Outliner is basically a means of
structuring a piece of writing, giving 'levels' of importance to each
idea. You can think of this as being rather like the way a book is
built up with a title and chapters. Inside each chapter is the next
level down and so on. Using an Outliner allows the finer detail to be
filtered out by hiding the lower levels so that the important ideas
stand out.

ARCOutline allows up to eight levels of idea which may be displayed as
required. An idea file called 'ARCOutline' lists the major features -
double clicking on this will load the main program and allow you to
experiment. File loading and saving is completely RISC-OS standard,
i.e. by clicking and dragging files to the ARCOutline icon on the icon
bar or the main window.

To set up the required file type (ARCOutline assumes &004 is called
AOutline) place a copy of the file_004 icon in the !Sprite file of the
!System application and ensure that a '*SET File$Type_004 AOutline' is
executed when the disk is booted.

If you start ARCOutline by doubling clicking on the application icon
it will load this file which will appear as a window with a grey bar
at the top of it which is the title icon. Clicking select on this will
position the caret and allow text to be entered. If you begin by
dragging or double clicking on an Outline file and then select 'New
Outline' from the menu you will get the same result.

To add further lines of text position the pointer over the line which
preceeds the new one and click 'menu'. Choose 'Add After' from the
menu (adjusting the number of lines to insert on the sub-menu if
required) and the lines will be added. Note that the 'Delete', 'Move',
'Promote' and 'Demote' options all work the same way i.e. it is the
line that the pointer is over when the menu is triggered that is
important. With 'Move' note that you have to select the move option
twice, once to pick the line to move and once to select the line to
move it after.

The version of ARCOutline referred to here is 1.04 and is very
provisional with several features (such as FWP file transfer) not
implemented. The outline is is also quite restricted in size and
adding too many extra lines may cause a crash so use it with care!



