Writing and outlining go hand in hand. You’ve heard that so many times that you might believe it's a cliche. It's not, as any good writer will tell you. Outlining isn't always necessary, but preparing an outline helps sharpen your ideas. That's why outlining software is so popular.
Outliners are available as standalone applications (like MORE and ThinkTank), DAs (like Acta), and as parts of word processors (as in Word and FullWrite Professional). The best and most versatile are the stand-alone products (in particular, MORE). However, the stand-alone outliners aren't very good word processors. So, if you want to outline and write in the same session, you frequently need to quit and switch or use MultiFinder (which isn't a reasonable option for most users who have 1 megabyte of RAM or less). And the outliners built into the word processors are, at best, fair. That leaves DAs.
DAs are the natural place for an outliner. If the outliner is a DA, you can use it freely while in any word processor, page layout program, or other application. And if the outliner is one of the absolute best outliners available (as Acta 2.0 is), then you’ve got the best of both worlds.
On a very basic, do-a-simple-outline level, Acta works easily and offers no surprises. Topics and families are easily created and modified. There are Command-key equivalents for virtually all options. Up to four different outlines can be on-screen at once. You can cut and paste between an outline and the application you're currently running.
Topics and families can be expanded or collapsed at a click (or key combination). Selections can be dragged to new locations within outlines. Topics are restricted to 32,767 characters (32K). Outlines can run up to 2,000 levels deep, although your screen width restricts the number you can actually see (about 30 levels on a Plus or SE, more on a II). Topics cun be sorted either alphabetically or numerically, and sorts can be either A-to-Z or Z-to-A ordered. Multiple typefaces are possible within outlines, although topics are restricted to a single typeface. Plain, bold, italic, underline, and outline type styles arc supported. Mac II users can select from eight basic colors.
Acta comes preset to use New York as its default typeface, regardless of what your application font is set to, and to use curly rather than straight quotation marks and apostrophes. These would be major annoyances, if it weren’t for a companion application called Configure Acta. This simple program lets you change the defaults in your installed copy of the Acta DA. You can specify both typeface and size, as well as how the items that you can set with the Options command should be preset. Neat, but also necessary.
There's one setting that’s missing: the one that sets up the window size when you open Acta. You get a window about an inch narrower than the screen width. Yes, you can readjust or zoom it easily, but I'd like to see, at the least, several windowing options. For example, my preference would be for a shallower but wider window. Anyone reasonably familiar with ResEd it could hack WIND ID -16000 (in an uninstalled copy of the DA) to suit their taste, but that shouldn't be necessary.
Acta comes with a set of what it calls formal drivers. These are placed in your System folder. They allow Acta to read and write various formats. The set of format drivers is constantly being added to. At press lite it included MORE, ThinkTank. WriteNow, Works, and RTF (Rich Text Format), as well as text-only and the Scrapbook.
Acta, until recently, was bundled with MORE. You might still be able to find it this way. in the future it will be bundled with Cricket Presents. A revision to version 2.0 is expected shortly also. It appears that, along with general enhancements, version 3.0 will add an application to run your outlines.
Acta is a well-designed, well-implemented program. If you outline, you should have Acta. If you write but don't outline, try Acta. You'll be a better writer.
Bobker, Steve. (October 1988). Acta. MacUser. (pgs. 76-77).
David Dunham
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
6 / 
2021-11-28 / 
aa2834b663f002868f73919501ec91632caf55a3 / 
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Acta_2.0.sit_.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
