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osiris@polari.online.comi (David Ruggiero) writes:
: My SO has joined the local university faculty and will be preparing many
: course outlines for her classes this fall. She would, understandably, like
: to find a Mac tool to help with this. (She has Word, of course, but the
: outlining features in that program are too cumbersome and inflexible for
: her needs.)
: 
: I'm a PC user myself :-( , so I don't know what to tell her to buy...I'm
: primarily thinking of something like ThinkTank (which runs on my PC; I'm not
: sure if it was ever ported to the Mac), but with automatic numbering
: and lettering features. Anyone have any suggestions or comments? What to look
: at, where to find it, what to avoid?
: 
: Feel free to post or email as you wish. Thanks much.
: 
: David Ruggiero (osiris@polari.online.com)

The best outliner by a wide margin is MORE, from Symantec. It's the 
direct descendant of Think Tank.

The street price is around $250 (though for folks in the Bay Area, I just
saw a shrink-wrapped version of MORE 3.0 for $79 at "Weird Stuff Warehouse"
in Sunnyvale. I don't know if it's the latest version, 3.1). 

Acta 7 is a much cheaper alternative, but is very limited (no clones, no
slide presentation features, etc.). Street price is around $75.

MORE 3.1 is a clean outliner, with several advanced features:

* Cloning. Any heading can be "cloned" and then moved anywhere in the
document. Make changes to either one, and the other changes. (This is a
form of hypertext, in that the text appears to be in many places at once.
Also, you can jump from a heading to its clone.)

* Many forms of overhead slides...just like Aldus's "Persuasion" (which
also has an outliner and which is an alternative to MORE) and Microsoft's
Powerpoint (no outliner in versions I have seen).

* Powerful style sheets, similar to Word's.w

* It can handle large text files. For example, I have a 1.8 MB document with
several hundred clones that runs acceptably fast on my Powerbook 100 (fast
enough that I prefer it to using my IIci).

I have heard that "Fair Witness," from Chena, is good, but I haven't had 
a chance to evaluate it.w

Once you get hooked on MORE, you'll use it for research, notes, papers, 
presentations, "to do" lists, and, especially, for thinking out things.

Hope this helps.


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