To maintain the tree-like structure, it would need to change the heading level (and possibly later headings as well), or would move (possibly large) sections of text around without changing the header level at all, and I don’t think either of these feel natural in a markdown document.
Yeah—I figured it would be nontrivial to implement. MS does a decent job of it in Word, although very few people know how to use it.
Folding only affects the document view itself, rather than the outline.
Thanks for the tip—I was trying to use the shortcut keys and getting nowhwere. Is that documentation inaccurate, or am I just missing something?
Can you talk about your specific workflow there? Where would your outline come from?
One way of representing a mind map is as an outline, although this misses things like non-hierarchical connections between branches. OPML is a markup language that allows sharing at least the hierarchical organization of a mind map as an outline, between different apps. I can export OPML from MindNode or SimpleMind and read it into Scrivener as a document structure or Word as a multilevel list.
Scrivener is the only app I’ve found that will read OPML and turn it into header levels, which is how most apps I’ve seen implement real document outlines or structures—it’s very similar to an ordered or unordered list, but the formatting and outline processing features are completely different. I’ve searched, and there is no way to move between the two in Word natively—you have to purchase a plugin or add-on for Word or do outboard processing. Since multi-level headings actually allow you to create an overall document structure, TOC, etc., those are what I’m interested in. Lists are helpful, but only within larger portions of text.
I’ve seen posts from others who want to convert from lists to document headings, but programs that actually do this seem to be as rare as hen’s teeth, likely because so few people know that outline processing exists in Word (or other apps), much less how to use it. It also leans heavily on styles, which very people know how to use at all, let alone use well. My design background is that I was the geek in a design studio, and I used styles heavily in Quark Express to make setting lots of text easier and more consistent, as well as easier to change across an entire document by updating the style.
Markdown and HTML 3 and higher explicitly use functional tagging rather than typographical tagging, although you can still tag text as bold and italic rather than strong and emphasized. The advantage to functional tagging is that you are marking how text functions in a document—as a header, caption, or footnote, rather than large and bold or small and italic. If you want to change all the level 2 headers, you just update the style sheet rather than doing a search and replace on all instances of a particular kind of formatting. Good web designers understand this intuitively now, because we’ve been using CSS for so long. Markdown doesn’t care what font face or size or spacing you use for a level 2 header–it’s just a level 2 header, and the style sheet determines how it will look. Changing which style sheet you use can drastically change the look and even structure of a document in just a few clicks, where that would have taken hours or days of work previously. And long documents, like books or bibles, can be formatted with very little human intervention, so long as they are tagged properly. Any website that renders well on a desktop screen and mobile phone relies on this same concept.
Anyway, I suspect this is pretty natural to you, at least if you were born after about 1990—it’s just how things are done now, at least for web formatting. I still see horrible things in Word. It appeals to my geekish sense of order and my love of automating repetitive processes so people can do the fun stuff. I’ve worked in IT in some fashion since the mid-80s with a heavy dose of design in the 90s, and this stuff combines the two. I haven’t worked as a programmer, except simple scripting, so I’m less familiar with how Markdown is used in, say, technical documentation or the ins and outs of git (little geek humor there).
Do that all make sense?
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