Grand Bout Mac OS

OmniOutliner (Mac OS X) Reads small to medium sized MORE documents. Very MORE-friendly company. Inspiration (Mac) The Macintosh version of Inspiration 6.0 could read MORE 3.1 files, but this ability was removed in Inspiraton 7.0. If you could find version 6 for Mac you could import into that; version 7.0/Windows can read Inspiration. Steinberg Application Installer Tool for Mac OS X. Latest Update: October 11th, 2016. The Steinberg Application Installer Tool is a software tool that allows for the installation of compatible as well as incompatible Steinberg software on Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite), 10.11 (El Capitan) and macOS 10.12 (Sierra).

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Introduction

Symantec was a heroic company in all-too-brief GoldenAge of the PC. Among other gems, it produced two related pieces of software, MORE 3.1(RIP 1991) for the Macintosh and GrandView 2.0 for DOS (RIP 1990).

Now, in the age of Word 2000 and its ilk, many of us sorely miss these aged works offine crafstmanship. Eight years after the death of MORE 3.1, there is absolutely nocomparable product on any platform, anywhere. ECCO Professional had many of the bestfeatures of GrandView, but it was killed in 1998 by the release of an effectively freeMicrosoft competitor: Outlook 98^[1]. MOREstill continues to be used on Macs, with output being distributed to other platforms asPDF!^[5]

This page was created to be a resource for MORE/GrandView veterans in ongoingwithdrawl. Shortly after its creation, inspired by my action or by the universal gestalt,Dave Winer created a better resource: www.outliners.com(note plural).

MORE 3.1

MORE is (was) an outlining word processor, with additional support for the very rapidgeneration of slideshow presentations. MORE's style sheets used a sophisticated andpowerful system for applying rules to a hierarchical document model (cascading stylesheets), using concepts familiar to object-oriented programmers (inheritance, overriding).

MORE did countless things that I've never seen done elsewhere. It helpedme think. With a very few enhancements (external cloning, AppleEvent support) it couldhave evolved into a comprehensive work environment. Brad Pettit (author of MORE2Text) calls it the software equivalent of a classicRock & Roll album. MORE was written in Pascal, and is a remarkably bug-free programthat runs on all Mac OS versions from 6.8 to 8.6. I have received conflicting reports forMacOS 9.0 and beyond (I run MacOS 8.6 currently). Steve H reports:

I have gotten MORE to work on most flavors of MacOS 9.X, although I have seen the reports of incompatibilities. I suspect that the conflicts that others report arise from third-party extensions.

Dave Winer wasone of the major contributors to MORE, in his 'retirement' he did Frontier. MattNeuberg did a great reviewof MORE 3.1 for Tibits.

There are several ways to move the content of MORE documents to otherplatforms or to other Mac applications. I've included all the ones I know of below. Or youcould stay with MORE^[2], it runspretty well on newer versions of the MacOS.

Downloading MORE 3.1

Symantec has graciously allowed Dave Winer to freely distribute MORE 3.1!! There is no support forthis of course. Be grateful to Symantec for doing this and Dave Winer for supporting it.

MORE 3.1 Documentation

Geoffrey Heard (who is so modest he neglected to mention it was he whocreated the PDFs from Brad Pettit's antique PageMaker files) informs us that Nick Lowe ishosting PDF versions of the MORE 3.1 documentation. Nick's excellent MORE support page is here, it is wellworth a visit.

Geoff has also sent me copies of the PDF files he produced, so I'll joinNick in publishing them. He has done a yeoman's job putting this together. These are notscans, but rather standard PDF output. Readability is superb.

Persons less 'seasoned' than I may be shocked at the amount ofdocumentation that came with MORE. Partly those were the days -- back then vendors put ahuge amount of effort into producing documentation. I think, however, that MORE was such aclass piece of software the development team wanted to be sure users exercised every partof it.

• Kickstart.pdf: Geoff wrote this based on his experiences - a getting started guide from a modern perspective..
• Tutorial.pdf: A superb introduction.
• Quick Reference.pdf: Geoff had trouble with the fonts for this one that produce the key symbols. If anyone can find the Macintosh font 'New IBM Keycaps' he will redo this file. I kept this document close at hand while I was learning and using MORE.
• Enhancements.pdf: what's new in 3.1 (vs. 3.0), less relevant now but a quick feature overview.

Brad Pettit's Translators

MORE2Text and MORE2XML

Brad Pettit was one of the original MORE developers (versions 2 to 3.1).In January of 1999, at least partly inspired by an early version of this web page, Bradwrote a Macintosh drag and drop translater for MORE files. It turns outlines into text,with a tab character for each level of outline indentation. Outline items are terminatedwith carriage returns, and embedded tab and return characters are encoded as 't' and'r'.

By Aug 1999, Brad had made available an XML exporter for MORE 3.1! Thissoftware is available at through Brad Pettit's website.

Brad developed this software as a gift to all MORE users. It is free. Heis a net-hero. In Oct. 2002 I asked him if he might make the XML output OPMLcompliant, in that case one would be able to browse an exported MORE document in IE 6,I suspect, a future version of Mozilla!

Claris XTND Translator

You used to be able to use the MORE ClarisTranslator (zip file, needs Stuffit Expander or ZipIt) on a Macintosh. Claris programswill then be able to import a MORE outline. I used it with MacWrite II. It might work withClaris Impact. For inexplicable reasons Apple/Claris abruptly abandoned the XTNDarchitecture, so this module is of limited use^[3].

Geoff Heard reports:

I tried Brad's Claris XTND translator to allow MacWrite II to directly open MORE files and tried it on the couple of other XTND using apps. The results were not great.

AppleWorks 5 can use this translator to recognise MORE files, but only the heads appear on opening -- the 'comments' (body text) are absent.

NisusWriter 6 recognises the MORE file through this translator, but also opens with only the heads, with a new page for each head. In addition, the righthand margin is the same as the lefthand margin - you get only an initial letter. Select the whole document and drag the righthand margin to the right, and you will get the heads.

The drag and drops worked fine.

If I want to open MORE files in either AW or NW, I still do best saving MORE as either MSW4 or MWII, then opening those files using the XTND translators. Perfect, or very nearly so. Footers are lost, I think.

MORE on Wintel

Max T. reports that one alternative to leaving MORE is running it on aWintel box (edited by jf):

I'd like to report that I'm very happy running MORE 3.1 in emulation with system 8.1 using an open source program called Basilisk II. My work platform is a PII500 running W2K. Networking, file exchange, even running More 3.1 in a separate window works.

When I need a quick, cross-platform presentation I write the outline in MORE then I export the slides to PICT, drop them in QT Pro and voila, almost like the old days. Or there is always PrintToPDF which makes a nice cross-platform solution.

Exporting to Word 4.0

MORE can save outlines as Word 4.0 documents, which can be imported intoWord 97 on either platform. The resulting document looks OK, but because of the way thestyle sheets work it can be very hard to edit.See also Word, TheAbomination.

Exporting to dotHead Format

MORE's can export to the ascii 'dotHead' format, which Ready!also used. DotHead is a hierarchical format which is parsable by, say, a Perl guru or evena Word macro.

Windows Importing

On the Windows side, the only importer I've found is GrandView. See below. You can export the data as WordPerfect 5.x or asciitext.

OmniOutliner (Mac OS X)

Reads small to medium sized MORE documents. Very MORE-friendly company.See below.

Inspiration (Mac)

The Macintosh version of Inspiration6.0could read MORE 3.1 files, but this ability was removed in Inspiraton 7.0.If you could find version 6 for Mac you could import into that; version 7.0/Windows canread Inspiration 6.0 files. See more on Inspiraiton below.

GrandView under Win 95+

GrandView was a fascinating program, written, like PC Outline, by John Friend. It wasbased on ThinkTank, Ready! and PC-Outline, ancient DOS outliners ^[4]. GV and MORE shared developers and were both handledby Symantec. GrandView added fields to the outliner model -- later the much mourned ECCOProfessional expanded on this idea.

GrandView can import a MORE Macintosh file that is less than 64K (ancient DOS memorysegment limit). It doesn't help with MORE presentations, but it'll sort of handle smallerdocuments.

To run GV under Windows 95 or OS/2, create a batch file which has the following commandline: [path]gv.exe %1 %2 /A /T. Create a shortcut to this batch file. You can edit theparameters of the shortcut (EMS, XMS, etc, but no editing is needed). Clicking on thisfile will launch GrandView in a window.

You can now import MORE documents into GV, and work with them.

Symantec's FPT site has some limited resources for GV 2.0 users: ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/products/grandview/

GrandView, Y2K and Windows 9x.

GV is a DOS program. You'd expect it to have some grave Y2K problems, and at least oneuser couldn't open any files at all. I was unable to create any new outlines in my copy ofWindows 95; I never tried with Win2K or later (It may be that there's a limit on how manyfiles can be placed in a directory, or a problem with file name length?) Others have nothad any trouble and continue to use GV well into 2002.

Importing a GrandView fileinto Inspiration (from Steve Cohen)

• In GV: change the outline labeling to 'Indentation w/no Labels.' Export the file using the 'Paragraph' export option. Add the ' .txt' extension to the exported file name.
• In Inspiration: Open the exported file. The Inspiration outline should have virtually the same structure as the GV outline, with perhaps only a little touch-up necessary.

OPML

OPML is an XML file format that supports the cross-platform exchange of outlinercontent. See What is OPML. I'm not sure how muchtraction OPML is getting, but it's probably going to be supported in OmniOutliner and it's supported in Frontier/Radio.IE 5.5 and later can even open and read OPML documents directly. I would think OpenOfficeshould be a natural for OPML support, but I've not heard anything.

Alternatives

Windows and Macintosh

(see also MORE on Wintel)

Inspiration

Inspiration is an outliner and graphicalconcept mapping tool that is marketed only to educational users, and increasingly itfocuses on early school. About 1 million school computers are licensed to use Inspiration.It's really a fascinating little program, you can get it for a reasonable fee from the www.inspiration.com, they also have a demo versionfor downloading. I use Inspiration for many tasks that I used to use Visio for; Visio isan entire battle-fleet; Inspiration is a zippy cruiser. If Inspiration were to use XML astheir file format, and provide a web-standard vector graphics output (one can dream ofSVG/XML as the file format) they'd be a very interesting product.

Inspiration 7.0/Mac has lost the ability to import MORE documents. Inspiration 6.0 hada horrible bug that led to corruption of moderately complex graphical maps. The'bug-fix' is an $40 upgrade to version 7.0. I think Inspiration did poorly tocharge for this fix, but I'm sure their finances are very tight. After having recoveredfrom paying for the bug fix I've found version 7.0 a very pleasant and agreeable tool.Inspiration puts both Mac and Windows versions of Inspiration on the same CD.

As an outliner Inspiration is not as powerful as MORE, but as a mapping tool it's veryneat in its own right. See Matt Neuberg's Tidbits review of Inspiration 4.0and also Importing a GrandView file intoInspiration.

Frontier/Radio Userland

Frontier is a costly ($900) Windows/Mac webdevelopment environment with XML support and a server/server management package (Manila).It has deep roots in the Macintosh, going back to the 1980s. The core parts of Frontierhave been repackaged and sold as RadioUserLand, a $40 desktop weblog (content management) environment.

Frontier and Radio were built by some of the people who did MORE and its predecessors.Frontier can read the dotHead format -- one of MORE's export formats. Frontier 6 might beable to read MORE2Text (XML) output into its enhancedoutliner.

• As a writer I've come home! (Dave gets the MORE effect from Frontier 6, alpha)

Microsoft Word

Word has outliner features. Some people claim to like it. I think Word has evolved intoan abomination that's given both outlining a style sheets abad rep.

WordPerfect

The current version of WordPerfect for Window is said by one user to have asubstantially better outliner functions than Word.

Macintosh Only

As of 2004 there's been an explosion of outliners, mind mappers, information managersand the like for OS X. Many of them incorporate outlines of one sort or another, but mostof them are not primarily outliners or writing tools. It is a wonderful sign of the powerof the OS X platform however.

See also: Outlinersfor OS X.

OmniOutliner Pro 3.0 (OS X)

OO Pro was released in January of 2005. I bought it as soon as it came out. OO 2.xcould import 'smaller' MORE documents, but OO 3 will import the text of any sizeMORE document. It will also import and preserve MORE notes. I don't believe it canretrieve images embedded in a MORE slideshow however.

OO Pro 3 is the most serious effort in a decade to match the capabilities of MORE 3.1-- including the ability to produce well formatted print documents.. In some ways it goesbeyond MORE's outlining capabilities. It's database/columnar abilities make it a crossbetween MORE and GrandView, without MORE's drawing/presentation tools. (OmniGraffle is aseparate, but coordinated, drawing program.)

OO 3.x uses an XML native file format and it imports and exports OPML.See Omni site.

AppleWorks (OS X/Cassic)

As of Feb 2002 the version of AppleWorks bundled with OS/X machines contains a quitesimple but credible outliner. If I were writing on an OS X machine, I'd take a close lookat it.

BrainForest ProDesktop (Classic, maybe Carbon OS X)

A Palm application with a Mac desktop version.

WordPerfect (Classic, defunct)

JR reports that WordPerfect/Mac 3.5e (now free) had a little known patchfor it that incorporated some extensive outlining macros he'd written for an earlierversion of WP/Mac. This apparently turns WP/Mac into a quite decent outliner. In hiswords:

A few WP employees, although now assigned elsewhere, continued to work when they could to build a patch for 3.5e. They took my complete outlining command set and integrated it into the program - no more macros. Otherwise, the patch made the program more stable than any previous release had ever been.

It's a shame the program on CD has never been patched - the purchaser has to hear about the patch, and download it. A shame mainly because people are missing stability, but also because the outline commands are faster and smoother for having been integrated into the program.

You might want to look at the manual, 'Enhanced WordPerfect Outlining.' It's downloadable from Info-Mac or ftp.corel.com.

FullWrite Professional

I used this for a while. It was the most powerful WordProcessor I've used - ever. Ithad a very decent outliner. It was too slow on the hardware of the day, though it would bea peanut today. Unfortunately, the version I used to use was very buggy. FullWrite died alingering death, but Akimbo provides it free without support. It is incompatible with theModern Memory Manager in OS 7.6, but it apparently runs with OS 8 and 8.1; in 8.6 thoughit failes in my testing. At one time one could download from ftp://ftp.akimbo.com/fullwrite and use theregistration code FREE-33333-33333. (Thank you to JR.)

FullWrite is supposed to support the XTND architecture, so with the MORE Claris Translator it might import MORE files.

Of course this would mean migrating from one dead product to another!

Windows Only

Thanks to Steve C for many of these suggestions. Steve is a GV guru who has evaluatedwell over 50 outliner/PIM products. Below is a summary of his opinions (all errors aremind). My strong recommendation would be to not put your data into proprietary fileformats. The perfect product, from my perspective, would use ascii text with XML syntax,possible zipped to bundle any binaries. In other words, the OpenOffice file format. So if only someone(s) wereto write an Outliner that would work with OpenOffice files ....

Preferred

• Treepad (Oct 2002: Steve reports much improved with multiple versions)
• Zoot (Note however, that as of January 2001 the web site says the final release of 4.0 will ship in Aug 2000)
• Jot+ Notes: Robert Bull reports this app can now import and export XML (?OPML) with the free-to-registered-users utility.
• MindJet MindManager: I use this on XP. It has a proprietary file format and will not import MORE files. It's outliner is very limited, it's really a mindmapping tool. It serves that function fairly well. It's real strength is graphic layout, the elegance of many of the graphical elements, and its simplicity.

No longer recommended

• InfoRecall: An earlier version crashed my system & damaged files. I found numerous small bugs suggesting less-than-careful programming.
• InfoTree (from Nextword): I used this for a few months, but gave up because not that user-friendly and some problems related to pasting email. Also uses the memory hog MS Access engine.
• Personal MicroCosms Vault: I had problems with it.

Others (not evaluated yet)

• Bansai can import and export XML, it's a Palm app with a paired Windows desktop outliner
• Advanced Data Management Systems: rather ambitious!

Grand Bout Mac Os Download

FAQ

1. How can I get a copy of GrandView or MORE?

   Symantec has allowed Dave Winer to distribute MORE. Download it from http://www.outliners.com/more31/ GrandView is not available; it also likely suffers from significant Y2K problems!

2. Can you get the MORE file format?

   Symantec has been asked about this many times in the past 8 years. One intrepid MORE-orphan tried to track down Symantec developers who worked with the file format.

   The answer appears to be NO. It is unclear that Symantec has any of the MORE source code or specifications on hand. However, several vendors (Inspiration, OmniOutliner appear to have reverse engineered much of the file format.)

3. It depends. MORE 3.1 was written with careful attention to Apple programming models. It runs under System 6.8 through 8.5.1. (GH) MORE 3.0 did have problems, with system 7.0, that was fixed with the 3.1 release. Some of the color menu selection appear in gray-scale on 8.5, this may be due to a system 8.5 bug. It is reported, however, that OS 8.6 causes problems with submenus.

   OS 9 has been said to have problems -- when a dialog opens on top of a MORE window and the dialog is then dismissed, the MORE window does not refresh. Geoffrey Heard reports: 'You may now safely say MORE 3.1 runs as solid as a rock and as fast as the bullet train on Mac OS 9.0.4.', however more recently Max T reports that many things are broken on 9.2.2. Steve H, on the other hand, reports good results with many versions of 9.x; he thinks problems may be due to added extensions.

   Brad Pettit reports: 'I've used the Outliner with 9.1 on my 7500, which has been updated with a Newer Technologies (RIP) G4 card. Altough I haven't touched every feature, the ones I've used work fine. The most serious problem I've experienced is the cosmetics of the menus -- MORE uses a custom menu definition to implement 'walk-down' menus (Command-Space). It still works, although the menu background is white. (I've noticed the white menu background on MacOS 8.6.)

   John F has run MORE most recently under OS X 10.3.6. In limited testing it works surprisingly well in the OS X classic mode (9.2)

4. What's the best way to move 300 MORE documents into something I can use on my PC?

   Drop them onto MORE2TXT.

5. Is it possible to use the MORE Claris Translator with an Apple-Scriptable Macintosh translator utility?

   Older versions of BBEdit could use XTND, and they were is scriptable. It could be used to serially transform MORE documents into ascii text. BBEdit has discontinued support for XTND however (thanks Jason).

6. Can I run MORE under Windows using a Macintosh emulator?

   Check out www.outliners.com for discussions and see MORE on Wintel above.

7. What would you look for in a MORE/GV replacement?

   Something that used XML as its native file format and also published the DTD. I'm through with proprietary file formats. (Update: Omni Outliner Pro 3.0 may be just this.)

8. If you like MORE on the Macintosh so much, why move to Windows?

   Everyone needs to run Windows -- for now. I split my personal work between a handbuilt XP box and my iBook. I'm expecting to buy another Mac, which will shift the balance of power back to OS X in our house.

Footnotes

History

• May 2005: link to new location for WordPerfect/Mac
• Jan 2005: Updated with information on Omni Outliner Pro.
• Oct 2002: Interesting developments added with OPML, XML, Radio UserLand, OmniOutliner and Inspiration.
• Feb 2002: The page continues to attract email, so I put through some minor clean-ups.
• Jan 2001: Updates (some long delayed), link to MORE documentation.
• Jan 23, 2000: GV Y2K update, minimal clean-up and updates.
• Aug 9, 1999: Updated with Dave Winer's download site for MORE, and Brad Pettit's latest magic, MORE2XML!
• Feb 5, 1999: Added links to Matt Neuberg's reviews of MORE and Inspiration.
• Jan 30, 1999: posted link to Brad Pettit's MORE2Text translator! Fixed some links and text.
• Jan 25, 1999: additions based on input from former MORE developers, from the Frontier team, and from fellow MORE veterans.
• Jan 24, 1999: minor revisions
• Jan 23, 1999: first version

Grand Bout Mac Os 11