[MagnumOpus]

> neither does Word

MS Word has an interactive draggable outline view with the promote/demote/drag features ("View"|"Outline"), it also has a navbar outline view ("View"|"Navigation Pane" checkbox). You can use both combined.

[adrianmsmith]

The "move heading up/down" don't work as well as LyX.

On Word, if you move a heading up/down with the buttons (in "View"|"Outline") the heading moves but the text and sub-sections underneath it don't move.

Before:

    MY HEADING
    Some text
       SUB-HEADING
       Text about the sub-heading
       SUB-HEADING 2
       More text

If you take "SUB-HEADING 2" and click "move up", the document is now:

    MY HEADING
    Some text
       SUB-HEADING
       SUB-HEADING 2
       Text about the sub-heading
       More text

What you want, when you move a heading, is not only to move the heading, but to really move the whole section, including: the heading, its text, and sub-headings, the text under the sub-headings, etc.

LyX moves the sections around, Word only moves the headings.

I'll concede that dragging in Word does give the desired effect (I admit I never tried drag before you mentioned it, despite having used Word for 25 years and always wishing for that feature. I assumed dragging did the same as the buttons.) And the indent/outdent buttons do work take their contents with them as well.

[orev]

What is your text is not related to the heading? In Word just select everything you want to move, then move it all together.

Also Ctrl-Alt-arrow moves the sections around.

[derefr]

Why would your text be unrelated to the header?

In an editor with first-class outlining support, the document is usually composed with the outline view in play, so essentially you’re always adding text and headers to a “node” rather than to the document as a whole. You then place the node in the outline, rather than placing text in a linear document that happens to (sometimes) reflect a valid outline.

It’s less comparable to Word, and more comparable to editing .rtf files and placing them into a flow in Desktop Publishing software. The content (the .rtf file) and the document (the flow-boxes) are separate, and can be modified separately without knowledge of how the other side has been modified.

(This workflow also being the original TeX workflow, just replacing “.rtf files” with individual .tex content files, and “the layout” with a structural .tex file that imports those content files.)

[orev]

Because a writing app supports the act of writing. Once you’re done writing, you don’t need the app anymore. And when you’re in the act of writing, things are often not linear. You might come up with headers first, and fragments of text, usually in the order they pop into your head, not the order they need to be in the final copy. Then you wordsmith and reorder things to get them into a progression.

And in Word you can always collapse the section and then move it around with all of the text.

[mschaef]

MS Word's outlining feature was there in Word for Windows 1.0 at the latest, which makes it close to 30 years old.