A special site for exploring the outliner built into Radio UserLand.
How to use the outliner
What is an outliner?
An outliner is a text editor that allows you to control the level of detail that's visible, and allows you to reorganize text according to its structure.
Outlines are just lists of lists, carried on to as many levels as you want. The grouping is arbitrary and totally up to you. The outliner has commands that make it easy to browse and reorganize structured information.
Getting started
To create a new outline, launch the Radio application, and bring it to the front. On Windows, look in the tray in the lower right corner of the screen, you'll see a white square with a blue dot in the middle. That's Radio's icon. Right-click the icon with the mouse and choose the Open Radio command from the popup menu, as shown in this screen shot. On the Macintosh, choose the Radio application from the System tray.
Choose New from the File menu.
To try out the instructions on this page, choose Open URL from the File menu, and enter this URL:
http://static.userland.com/gems/radiodiscuss/states.opml
Here's a screen shot of the outline as it opens.
Controlling detail
As you look at an outline, scan down the left edge looking for black wedges. Any black wedge can be expanded, it has information collapsed underneath it. To expand a line, double-click on the wedge.
The illustration below shows an outline with a headline collapsed, and the same outline with the headline expanded.
Reorganizing
You can move a line using the mouse or with command keys. When you move a line, all the lines underneath it move also, whether or not they're expanded.
To reorganize with the mouse, point at the wedge of the line you want to move. Point at another line. Note that its wedge turns into an arrow, indicating where the line will be dropped. If you nudge the mouse to the right, the arrow now points to the right. When you let up on the mouse, the line moves to its new location.
You can also use the keyboard to regorganize. The following table explains.
Windows Macintosh Meaning Control-U Cmd-U Move a line up at the same level Control-D Cmd-D Move a line down at the same level Control-R Cmd-R Move a line to the right (it becomes the last subhead of the line above it). Control-L Cmd-L Move a line to the left (it becomes the next sibling of its former parent).
Tab and Shift-Tab to move a line to the right and left.
Adding new lines to an outline
To add a new line to an outline, place the cursor above or near the point where you want to add the line, and press Enter. (Mac users press Return).
Use the reorganization commands to position the line exactly where you want.
Type the text. If you want to enter another line, press Enter. When you're done entering new lines, click on the wedge to the left of the headline.
Undo
Most editing operations in the outliner can be undone. Choose the Undo command in the Edit menu.
Two modes
There are two modes in the outliner: text mode, where the insertion point is a flashing caret; and structure mode, where the cursor is shown as a black inverse bar.
You can toggle between modes by pressing the numeric keypad's Enter key. You can also use the mouse -- if you're in text mode, click on the wedge to return to structure mode; if you're in structure mode, click on the text to get the flashing caret. On Windows F2 toggles between text and structure mode.
The structure mode cursor is also called the "bar cursor" because it looks like a bar.
Selecting multiple headlines
To select more than one headline, on Windows, hold down the Control key and click on the headlines you want to select. On a Mac hold down the Cmd key and click.
HTML editing
Radio is designed to edit HTML text, it's focus is on writing for the Web, and HTML is the common format of the Web.
The HTML menu has many common formatting and linking commands, so you don't have to memorize complex codes. And for the most common stylings, bold, italic, underline; and linking, it displays the markup in a visible way. (Screen shot.)
If you want to switch modes and see all the HTML tags, choose the Format Text command in the HTML menu, its keystroke is Control-` (Cmd-` on Macintosh). (Screen shot.)
The specific HTML tags that it generates are: <b>, <i>, <u>, and <a href..>.
You can view an outline as HTML by choosing View in Browser from the File menu. If the outline is stored on a server, your browser will load the page from the server.
If the outline is stored on your hard drive, Radio will render the outline as an HTML file on disk, and your browser will display that file. If the outline contains rules, then rules will be applied when rendering. Otherwise, it will be rendered as a set of unordered lists with the same structure as the outline. (Screen shot.)
XML editing
A lesser-known feature of Radio is that it can be used to edit any XML file in the outliner.
When you choose the Open command, and the file you're opening has a .xml suffix, it opens in an outline. One of two things happen:
1. If it's not an OPML file, you see the XML as it is stored in the file. You can edit the tags, of course. When you save, it saves as XML, it doesn't convert the outline to OPML format. Screen shot.
2. If, instead, it is an OPML file, the file opens as an outline and the tags are hidden.
Linking and The World Outline
To create a link node in any outline, put the bar cursor on a headline that you want to turn into a link. From the Radio menu, choose the Add Link command. Enter the URL you want to link the headline to.
If you link to an HTML page, when you double-click on its wedge, the page you link to will open in your Web browser. But if you link to an OPML file it will expand underneath the headline that links to it.
How does this work? Radio reads the outline over the Internet and fills in the result, as if the linked-to outline were part of the original outline. You'd use this form of linking if you wanted to create a network of Yahoo or DMOZ-style directories that's browsable through the outliner. You may have a friend who's an expert in an area that's relevant to your expertise, so you'd link to his or her outline, and whenever they make a change, your "virtual outline" would change too.
You can nest these inclusions as deeply as you want. It's OK for an included outline to include other outlines. There's no limit.
This is one of the most exciting features in Radio, think of it as a parallel Web of outlines, or as we were calling it when it was in development -- The World Outline.
Getting the OPML version of a Manila message
For background on using Radio to write for Manila see this page.
You can get the OPML version of any message on any Manila site by constructing a URL as follows. Start with the URL of the site:
http://radiodiscuss.userland.com/
Add discuss/reader$
http://radiodiscuss.userland.com/discuss/reader$
Add the message number, 54:
http://radiodiscuss.userland.com/discuss/reader$54
And then .opml
http://radiodiscuss.userland.com/discuss/reader$54.opml
If you click on that link, you'll get the OPML version of the message.
Note that this works whether or not the message was authored with an outliner, even if it was written in a Web browser.
Save As HTML
To save an outline to disk as HTML, choose Save As HTML from the File menu.
If an outline contains rules, it's rendered the same way Manila renders outlines.
If an outline does not contain rules, it's rendered as a set of nested unordered lists -- the HTML page resembles the outline. (Screen shot.)
You can change how Radio renders outlines by editing the script at user.pike.renderOutline.
Save As Plain Text
To save an outline as tab-indented text, choose Save As Plain Text from the File menu.
Once you have saved an outline as plain text, you can just choose Save next time. Radio remembers that it's a plain text outline.
Note that when you save as plain text, any node type data is lost. Only the text of the headlines is saved.
A use for this feature might be editing Python scripts or Java source code in an outline.
Bookmarks and outlines
Radio has a Bookmarks menu that works like the Bookmarks or Favorites menu in a Web browser. Look at the menu and see that there's an additional command, Add Boilerplate, that allows you to save often-used bits of outlines and insert them into other outlines.
To add a boilerplate item to the Bookmarks menu, select one or more headlines in an outline.
Choose Add Boilerplate in the Bookmarks menu. It will confirm that you want to add this item to the Bookmarks menu. It also gives you a chance to name it. The default name is taken from the selection -- but you can, of course, change it. A new item is added to the end of the Bookmarks menu.
Later, when you want to insert boilerplate into an outline, choose the item from the Bookmarks menu, and the sub-outline will be inserted.
Right-click menus
On Windows and Macs with two-button mice, you can "right-click" on something by pointing at the object and clicking on the right mouse button. On one-button Macs, hold down the Control key while clicking on the object.
Right-click menus are also called "contextual menus" because what you see in them depends on what you clicked on. There are commands that only apply to songs, and those that only apply to users, and RSS channels, and so on.
There's also a special menu where you can add your own commands that will always be there when you right click. To edit your custom right-click menu, choose Edit Right-Click Menu from the Developers sub-menu of the Tools menu.
Screen shots: Right-clicking on a song, user, RSS channel.
Comments
The Radio UserLand outliner can be used to edit scripts, and if you're writing scripts you need to be able to add comments.
If you want a line and all the lines nested underneath it to be viewed as a comment, press the Shift key while you create the line. Note that instead of a wedge, the line has a chevron to its left.
Any text that's indented under one of these lines is also viewed as a comment. You can go on and on, but thankfully, readers can collapse the whole comment down to a single line. So if you're verbose, the code doesn't become less readable.
Comments play an important role in programming. They are bits of text that are meant for the programmer but are ignored when the code is compiled. Comments are also used in other ways in Radio, for example the Directories feature in Manila understands comments and displays them specially.
You can also add comments at the end of a non-comment line by putting a pair of slashes before the comment. This only works for scripts, other kinds of outlines generally do not respect this convention.
The Outliner menu
More information about the outliner is on the Outliner Menu page.
© Copyright 2000-2008 UserLand Software, Inc. Radio UserLand and Radio are trademarks of UserLand Software.
Last update: Monday, December 16, 2002 at 12:19:41 PM.
Email: webmaster@userland.com
