WritingOutliner vs DocxManager

Posted in: Word, Word addin by Edwin on October 28, 2022

Both WritingOutliner and DocxManager have been developed for the same goal – outliner-organized, project-based writing with Microsoft Word. But the implementations are different.

User Interface
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– WritingOutliner is a Word add-in, which is embedded into Word window.
– DocxManager is the other way around – Word is embedded into the DocxManager main window.

I was trying to replace WritingOutliner with DocxManager, but it turned out that the way DocxManager controls Word makes it impossible to achieve good speed and smoothness when switching from a document to another.

Data storage
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– With WritingOutliner the Word documents in a project are stored in a SQLite database file.
– With DocxManager the Word documents are stored in the file system.

Each storage has its own advantages and disadvantages. Storing documents in a database in WritingOutliner makes it difficult to share and co-edit documents, and I’m planning a new feature that solves this problem – by storing the working documents in the file system so you can edit the documents externally, and WritingOutliner takes care of auto syncing back the changes to the database. That’s the initial idea.

WritingOutliner 2.0 Released!

Posted in: Version History by Edwin on October 25, 2022

After the development of the software was stalled for about 2 years since 2020, I overturned my previous decision. WritingOutiner is special mostly in that it’s built on top of Word, and it has potential.

That being said, the development of WritingOutliner has been restarted and will be continued – it won’t be stopped again any more.

I’ve got a lot of enhancement ideas sleeping in my mailbox sent from people all over the world over the years, and I’ve got my own ideas. Stay tuned.

What’s new

• User interface:
  • Reworked, automatic font size for high DPI monitors – no more small font issue on large screens, nor needing you to manually adjust the user interface scale for large screens (Note, if you have a very large monitor and still experience any font size issue, just send me the screenshots and I’ll fix it).
• Corkboard:
  • Index card: in addition to the status name that’s already displayed as stamp text on the card background, now the label name is also displayed in the footer of the card.
  • Arabic and other non-English characters can now be correctly displayed on the cards.
• Writing goal management:
  • See live word/character count in the metadata pane as you are writing.
  • Instant, non-disturb notification of the achievement of target word/character count.

• More user interface enhancements:
  • Larger, clearer status and label icons.
  • Non-disturb notification after a project document compilation (combination).
  • Small speed optimization of project document compilation (combination).
• Fixed a lot of blatant issues which has been introduced when upgrading for Win 10 and upgrading the development tool of WritingOutliner in year 2020.
• A bunch of small enhancements that are too trivial to list here.

The development of WritingOutliner has been restarted!

Posted in: Novel Writing Software, Version History by Edwin on October 12, 2022

The development of WritingOutliner has been restarted!

If you ask me why:

• WritingOutliner is so unique in that it’s built on top of Word.
• Many users still prefer it over the others.
• It feels so bad and nervous to abandon it, really.

The enhancement is already currently in progress, many issues have been fixed. In the meantime if you have any comments, suggestions or issue reports, feel free to send an email to edwin.yip@WritingOutliner.com