"in its outline" is a correct phrase in written English and can be used to describe the basic structure or general characteristics of a thing.
For example: "The novel follows the standard romance trope in its outline, with a few interesting twists."
This is her second novel and it's brutal in its outline.
It is this shape, vague in its outline, that became "the object".
As the horse closes in, its outline becomes clear: thank goodness, it is attached to a cart, and the driver is fully human and has a head.
In its outline, Hogan's story closely resembles that of the stereotypical compulsive gambler.
Summarised like that, Lucky Jim is not so very different in its outline from Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, written by Henry Fielding some 200 years earlier.
But the story is now complete in its outline, if not its details, and Trump's culpability is clear to anyone who cares to look.
I've read the transcript of Landesman's interview with Andrea, and despite some internal contradictions, it is impossible not to believe it in its outlines and in much of its detail.
While its mountainous foreground is a fantasia of landscape, the plain in the distance rolling away towards the sea resembles a map in its outlines of fields.
That morning, however, still haunted by his dream, and so full of concern about his play, he saw her as merely a name in his diary, stirring an old memory sharp in its outlines and faded in its detail.
In its outlines — a man of power humbled — the case (and Graff's hauteur) evokes that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former chairman of the International Monetary Fund accused of sexually assaulting a New York hotel worker.
It's a great story, and in its roughest outline it has some basis in reality.
