killermike wrote: > > I'm also a fan of outlining. For the last year or so I have a been using > a "mind mapping" tool called Kdissert.... > > The problem with this tool is that editors don't usually accept pitches in > graphical form. This means that the process of pitching an article consists > of mapping it out and then writing it up, which is rather long-winded. > > For this reason, like Steve, I've started to wonder if LyX itself can be used > for outlining thanks to the new outlining sidebar.
I recently wrote a short paper using the Freemind mind-mapping application and LyX. I used Freemind to collect ideas, and to add text (sometimes as much as an entire paragraph) as it occurred to me. (Freemind supports "long nodes" that contain formatted text, URLs, etc.) Then I used Freemind's XSLT export feature, with a stylesheet I kluged up, to export the map into a LyX document, with the hierarchy of the mind map converted into nested Enumerate environments. That document couldn't be rendered by LaTeX due to the enumeration depth limit, but LyX displayed it properly, and I easily cut and pasted text from it into a Koma-article document that became the final paper. One of these days I'll fix up the stylesheet to use the proper schedule of environments for Koma-article, so that I can go right from the Freemind map to a skeletal LyX document that can then be flushed out. (There's supposed to be a Ruby script that converts Freemind documents to LaTeX, but it's apparently no longer available, and there are advantages to doing it with XSLT: you can export from within Freemind, and you're using an engine designed for this purpose, so you can concentrate on the transformations rather than the implementation.) -- Michael Wojcik
