ConnectedText; any case studies?

Posted by Graham Rhind
Feb 15, 2012 at 04:49 PM

Steve,

We seem to be following parallel paths as far as ConnectedText is concerned. I gave it a cursory glance a few times, but the idea of learning a mark-up language struck me as ludicrous, something I thought I’d waved goodbye to with software from the 1980s.

But I gritted my teeth and tried CT properly, and once one learns the (pretty simple) markup, one sees how very useful and powerful CT can be.

I have a 2500 page resource, very heavy in text, graphics, maps and tables, in Word (via Writing Oultiner, to allow export to pdf) and in Personal Brain (to allow export to the web). PB was, however, having major problems with the size of each document (slowing to a complete stop in many cases), and the cross-referencing and internal linking possibilities were not very good. So I moved the whole shabang into CT. It took about 4 months because of the need to mark up and tag everything, but the result (finished yesterday) is rich, allows summaries, cross-referencing and links, customised html, and is a great improvement on the PB output. CT allows me to find missing information, bad links and gaps, so that I wasn’t only importing, I was improving. For example, in Personal Brain I had to put postal code formats in each country chapter, then make a new chapter and reproduce that information in summary. In CT I add it (tagged) to each chapter, then with a single command can produce a summary chapter which I know will be updated automatically when I change data in the country chapters. And it had remained fast. I’m curious to hear what my customers say. The whole thing is not for public consumption, I’m afraid, but you can read the blurb/watch the video at http://www.grcdi.nl/book2.htm

So basically I’m producing a wiki - which is what CT is about - but there’s a lot more it can do, to be sure.

After 2500 pages I still hadn’t reached the point of wanting (metaphorically) to throw CT out of the window, which says something about its flexibility - I did come across issues, but was able to side-step them. CT does have some issues, though. For me:

1) The import from rtf/html needs a great deal of work, because only the most basic of formatting is maintained. It can take hours to format a table in CT.

2) Metadata can only be edited to a limited degree, and as Eduardo (the developer) deftly sidesteps all requests for this, I’m guessing it won’t be implemented in the short term.

3) The markup lacks an escape mark to indicate that what follows should be taken as is. Thus, if you want to mark up any text containing double brackets, pipes and so on, such as regular expressions, chances are you’ll hit a snag.

4) I discovered on page 2499 that attributes have a limited allowable length :-( It’s quite long, but not long enough for what I needed ...

Eduardo has, though, in general, proved to be responsive, so I think I could have a lot more use for CT in the future.

Graham