How the indentation is read
Leading whitespace sets the level, with a tab counted as four spaces. Leading bullet characters — -, *, a middot — and any numbering already present are stripped, so you can paste a partly-numbered outline and have it renumbered cleanly. The reader uses a stack rather than dividing by a fixed indent width, which means uneven spacing still resolves: two spaces, then three, then two again all land on the same level. Lines that do not match the level they landed on are listed in the inconsistent-indentation table with what was assumed, and that table is worth a glance whenever a document has been edited in more than one editor.
Picking a numbering scheme
| Scheme | Ladder | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|
| Decimal | 1. / 1.1 / 1.1.1 | Specifications, reports, anything cross-referenced — "as covered in 3.2" only works here |
| Classic outline | I. / A. / 1. / a. | Essays, briefs, academic drafting, meeting agendas |
| Letter first | A. / 1. / a. / i. | Appendices, checklists, schedules attached to a longer document |
| None | indentation only | Drafts where the order has not settled and numbers would only need redoing |
Levels past the fourth fall back to a parenthesised counter in every scheme, which is a deliberate signal rather than a feature — if you are seeing it, the outline is too deep.
What the word budget is for
Give it a target and the count is divided equally among the leaf items, then summed back up the tree. The result is not a plan, it is a measurement: it shows you that one section holds eleven leaves and another holds two, which means the first will be five times the length of the second unless you intervene. That imbalance is invisible in the raw indented list and obvious in the budget table.
Two rules of thumb come out of using it. A leaf budgeted under about 60 words is a sentence, not a section, and should be merged upward. And the opening and closing almost always come in under their allocation while the central argument runs over, so expect to move a few hundred words from the ends toward the middle after the first draft.
When four levels appear
Three levels is about the limit of what a reader tracks without scrolling back. When a fourth appears, it is usually one of two things. Either a top-level heading is too broad and keeps subdividing, in which case splitting it into two headings flattens everything beneath it, or the outline has drifted into being a draft — the deepest level is holding sentences rather than topics. Leaving the bottom level as something you will expand in prose keeps the outline short enough to be useful as a map.
Questions people ask
Can I mix tabs and spaces?
Yes, with one tab counted as four spaces. That is a convention, not a fact — your editor may render a tab as two or eight — so a document indented both ways can produce levels you did not intend. Any line whose indent does not match the level it was assigned is listed with what was assumed, and fixing just those lines is usually a few seconds of work.
The allocated words do not add up to my target.
Each leaf allocation is rounded to the nearest ten, and those roundings accumulate. The gap is normally well under one percent of the target and it does not matter, because the number is there to show the relative weight of sections rather than to be hit exactly. Check the finished draft with text statistics if the real count matters.
Will the numbering survive a paste into Word?
The plain text and Markdown exports write the numbers as literal characters, so they survive the paste and then stay frozen — add a section later and you renumber by hand. If you want the word processor's own automatic numbering, export with numbering set to none, paste the indented list, and apply a multilevel list style there. You get live renumbering at the cost of the labels this tool generated.
What happens to a really long outline?
It reads the first 200 items and tells you how many it left out. Two hundred items is already past the point where an outline is doing its job as an overview — if you are there legitimately, splitting the document at the top level and outlining each part separately gives you something you can actually read.