Project outline

A project outline is the planning level above the document outline. Where a document outline structures the sections inside one document, a project outline structures the project itself: an ordered list of the parts you intend to write — chapters, articles, episodes — each with a title and a stated purpose. It is useful before a single document exists, which is the whole point: you can plan the shape of the work first, then realise each part as a document when you are ready.

Edit

Open it from the project, alongside the brief. Add, reorder, retitle, and reword the purpose of each section; changes save as you go. State what each part is there to do, not what it says — the same discipline as a document outline, one level up.

Realisation

Each section shows whether it has been realised yet. A section with no document is marked unrealised. Once a section becomes a document, it shows a link to that document and its live status, so you can see at a glance which parts of the plan exist and how far along they are.

Build documents from this outline

Once the outline has sections, build turns the whole plan into work in one step: it creates one document per section, each taking that section’s title, and assembles them into a binder in outline order. When the sections have no draft yet, the documents are created empty — build never writes any prose for you; it carries each section’s purpose onto its document so you know what that part is there to do, and leaves the writing to you.

Build is safe to run again. Sections already realised as a document are left alone, so a second build only adds documents for the sections you have added since — appended to the same binder, never a duplicate. Removing a section from the plan never deletes the document it built; the section simply reverts to unrealised.

Distribute existing prose

If you have already written a draft into one document and then outline it, you do not have to move the text by hand. Distribute existing prose takes that draft and splits it across the outline’s sections, cutting it at the headings that match your section titles. It never writes or rewrites anything — it only moves the words you already wrote — so a section whose title has no matching heading is left for you to place by hand.

You review the proposed split before anything moves: each section shows how much prose it would receive, and you confirm or cancel. Once you confirm, the draft is carved into the sections and assembled into the binder, and every cut is recorded in the binder’s structural history — so you can undo any of them from there, exactly as you would a manual split.