Inferred Hierarchy

May 7, 2022

Legend has always been rooted in outlining, but we wanted to bring you the power of an outliner even in normal documents. So today we have an experimental new feature that gives you all the power of an outliner without needing to indent.

You can now use Heading size to create a hierarchy. So items below an H1 will be considered its children, and an H2 creates another level of hierarchy.

You can see in this demo video that all of the normal outlining features like collapsing, zooming, and filtering work as expected, but by using Heading size instead of indentation.

The goal of this feature is to:

  1. Look more aesthetically pleasing as normal documents
  2. Reduce some downsides of deeply nested hierarchy where indentation reduces usable space for text, especially in small panes
  3. Appeal to people who are more familiar with regular documents than outliners

We are already using this extensively ourselves for some smaller documents where we don't need a lot of hierarchy, so segmenting by Heading is a clean way to visualize our projects.

Enabling

This feature is still a bit experimental, so it's not yet enabled by default. You can try it by enabling "Infer hierarchy from heading size" in the General section of the Settings.

Feedback

We would love your feedback on this feature. Please post in the forum thread or email us if you find any issues or have any suggestions.

Updated Homepage

We also updated our homepage with new videos and animations that are more descriptive about how Legend works. We hope you like it!