Re: For Those Like Steve Zeoli who prefer to write in the pi

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2542

Posted by graham.smith
2005-01-13 11:19:26

Alx,

I have used the 60/90 day demos of version 6 and 7.

There is a very helpful mailing list that you can join at the Nota Bene web page. Although, not a Nota Bene user, I have lurked, and contributed, there for a couple of years now.

The attractions of Nota Bene is that it is three programs in one, aimed at the academic author, but with a bias towards Arts subjects - which is not too good for us, but I didn’t find this to be a problem.

It is made up of a Word processor, a Bibliographic database (Ibid),and a database (Orbis)that indexes all Nota Bene files and allows you to add Notecards into this database. The outliner is meant to be very good, and the three applications are completely integrated.

It has a simple, but very powerful feel to it, and it has the potential of being the “one” program you would need for almost all your writing and textual data management tasks.

I haven’t switched to it, because it does not handle graphics well. It will import Bitmaps fine (which I never use) and will work with OLE applications, but my main statistics programs aren’t OLE enabled, so I couldn’t get any charts into NB. Well I could if I exported them as Bitmaps.

My current practice is to save charts as EPS files, which Wordperfect converts on the fly to WPG files that you can view in Wordperfect. However, Wordperfect still prints them as EPS files if you print to a Postscript printer, but uses the WPG files if the printer isn’t Postscript capable.

So while I liked the idea of NB for writing, it wasn’t really up to the job of Report Production.

I could do the writing in NB, then shift into WP for the final tidying up for production. However, everyone else I work with uses Word, plus a few of my clients are actually previous employers, where one of my legacies to them was giving training in Word and a sophisticated Word report Template that automates report production. This means that all the reports I do for them are in Word, plus the college where I teach uses Word.

The idea of juggling Word,, WordPerfect and NB was just too much for me. But when NB 8 comes out this year, I will be downloading the demo, as I still beleive that as a “writing tool” it cannot be bettered.

I will try and answer any other questions you may have, but the NB forum, is very helpful and there are sometimes questions on the theme of moving to NB.

Graham

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