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.)
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.
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.)