Hello,

I'm a fiction writer and I've had a problem for a long time with managing the large quantity of research that I have to do. I recently tried Personal Knowbase and like it a lot, but it doesn't have the ability to embed images in its article pages (you can link to images, but there doesn't appear to be any way to actually display the image itself in the article--as far as I can tell). It would also be very useful to be able to display an article as an HTML page, since I'm constantly downloading information from various internet sites.

The question is: does anyone know of a personal information manager with the same capabilities as Knowbase which can render HTML directly and display images?

Thanks for any recommendations.

Gary,

Personal Knowbase uses a flat keyword system, which puts it in a small minority. A program that also uses a flat keyword but allows embedding images in articles is ndxCards. It's the only one on Windows with these traits that comes to mind. Whether it has all of PK's abilities, I don't know; I have never actually used PK. ndxCard's metaphor, of course, is completely different from PK, if that makes a difference.

Stephen R. Diamond

Hi, Gary,

This may seem a cock-eyed recommendation, but I would suggest you take a look at The Journal:

http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/

It is a very robust writing environment that allows you to create many different notebooks (which are each hierarchical databases of RTF-style documents), residing under specific categories (including, but not limited to, dated entries--hence the name). So, for instance, you can create a category for a specific writing project, create one notebook for your notes, another for chapters.

Within each entry, you can mark text to a specific topic... which works somewhat like keywording... multiple topics can be assigned to any entry, but specific text within an entry can only have one topic. You can embed images into any entry. And you can export any single entry or a group of entries to an HTML file, which will include any images you've included. The HTML export isn't particularly sophisticated, but it works.

Anyway, that's just a suggestion. Otherwise, I'm afraid I can't think of any application that provides keywording, image support and HTML export. Have you contacted Bitsmith to see if they're planning an update of PK that would include these features? Seems like a natural next step for them.

Steve Z.

Hi Gary,

consider Whizfolders (http://www.whizfolders.com
I use it for storing research notes, project planning and writing. It does not have categories, but I use keywords in the topic of my notes and the outline for organizing.
The writing, searching and linking possibilities are very good.
It does not look extraordinary on the first look, but it's very nice to use.

best regards
Christian