Outline mode

What this accomplishes

Draft long documents section by section from an outline you approve before each step.

Start with an outline, let the agent draft one section at a time, and review each section before moving on. Suited to essays, research briefs, and other structured long-form work.

The editor is in document editor; citations in citation system; export in export to PDF and DOCX.

Current availability

This page documents behaviour verified in Miton development builds. Miton is still pre-release and is not publicly downloadable; invited beta users will receive a signed desktop build with automatic updates.

Before you start

• A Miton development build, an active project and Writer open.
• A connected model; keep the source material or existing document in the same project.

The outline panel

The outline panel shows the document’s headings (H1–H6) as a tree, built live from the document’s own #/##/… markdown headings — there’s nothing else to configure.

• Click to navigate — click a heading to jump the editor to it.
• Drag to reorder — drag a heading to move that section (and its own sub-headings) elsewhere in the document.

There’s no right-click menu and no search box in the panel itself; renaming, adding, or removing a heading is a normal edit in the document.

Drafting section by section

Ask the agent for an outline, review and edit the resulting headings, then ask it to draft one section at a time rather than the whole document at once. Reviewing each section before the next is drafted keeps the agent’s next section grounded in what you actually kept from the last one, and lets you correct voice or direction early rather than after a full draft. This is a way of working with the agent through chat — there’s no dedicated “draft section by section” button or configurable section-length setting.

What the outline mode does not cover

• A distinct editor mode — outlining is the same document editor and the same outline panel described above, used in a particular order, not a separate mode you switch into.
• Outline templates or export — an outline is just the document’s own headings; there’s no separate outline object to template or export apart from the document.

What success looks like

You start from an outline, keep the sections you want, and ask the agent to draft one section at a time so each new section can build on what actually landed in the last one — using the same outline panel and editor you’d use for any other document.

Common failures and recovery

• Confirm the intended document and project are active.
• Keep the original text when reviewing a model-proposed change.
• Check the model connection and retry only the failed action, not the complete document.

Related next action

Return to the Writer overview to choose the next document task.