Where Leo shines for me

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

Hi,

This is just a short story with two screenshots.

I have been using Leo less and less, as I go to live coding and moldable environments and I'm building my own interactive outliner (Grafoscopio) powered by Pharo. But recently I need to tackle a difficult text while preparing a couple of papers. This is a place where Leo shines for me, when you are deconstructing already existing text, written by other or by yourself, no matter if it is prose or code.

At some point, the hierarchical layout provided by the (excellent) TeXStudio LaTeX editor, with side previews, where not enough to organize the text further. I need a more granular approach to my ideas. As happened before, I remember using Leo to create emergent order from code and scripts that where organized beyond the class/methods hierarchy provided by code editors, and I did the same with this complex text. Thanks to the @file directive, I was able to use both tools in tandem: With Leo I organized the text in a granular way, finding redundancies, editing and moving outside of the article outline unnecessary ideas and with TeXStudio I used all the bells and whistles about PDF preview, querying bibliography, counting article words (not LaTeX commands) and so on. Such combination, allowed my to tackle the writing process in a way that no tool by itself could allow.

Here are the screenshots of the two tools working on the same text:

• Leo: https://imgur.com/duHQzHj.png
• TeXStudio: https://imgur.com/xvw1dwD.png

Grafoscopio is a research prototype that scaped the PhD, but still needs to mature a lot and has much to learn from Leo and its community.

Cheers,

Offray

[Matt Wilkie]

Thanks Offray. It's interesting to see/read a specific scenario like that. I haven't tried to use Leo for prose, other than just straight up journal style composition of my own stuff.

-matt

[vili]

On Monday, April 13, 2020 at 8:47:46 PM UTC+2, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote:

This is a place where Leo shines for me, when you are deconstructing already existing text, written by other or by yourself

Indeed, I've done it several times with quite some complicated legal and other texts, too -- with Leo - there is no better tool for doing that.

BR, Vili

[Thomas Passin]

This organizing ability is one of Leo's strong points for me.  Many text editors these days can show you a tree with functions or classes as the nodes.   Many word processors will show you a creditable outline.  But only Leo can do those things and also let you break up the material according to other organizing principles as well.

There have been times where I sketched out an algorithm in outline nodes, and then filled in the code.  The nodes would correspond to steps in the algorithm, but not necessarily any class, method, or function.  For example, a node might correspond to a loop, one that you might not want to pull out into a separate function.  Leo can help you keep it all straight.

I wrote the documentation for a consulting job as a Leo outline, targeted at producing a Sphinx document.  It was the most satisfying documentation that I've produced, from the point of view of writing and editing it, and the most searchable.  It was also the easiest to modify and restructure.