Greetings. For many years I used an excellent (for me) outliner embedded in the DOS word-processor for scholars, Nota Bene. I wrote everything within that outliner and became thoroughly accustomed to its typical, maybe old-fashioned, classroom subdivisions: I, A., 1., a., (1), (a), etc. which were part of the text itself.
Then I bought its Windows version, whose outliner lacks the structure I prefer. Although Iím an old guy (former professor, newspaper editor), I still want to finish various writing projects.
Can anyone recommend any Windows (XP) outliner programs with letter/numeral headings as indicated above (instead of triangles, arrows or other symbols)? Or, at least with numerical headings (1.1.1. etc)?
I would strongly prefer an outliner that is a modest word-processor with formatting and one in which I can complete a 400-age book.
It is not possible for me to access this forum often. If you post an answer, I would appreciate an email copy of it or, perhaps, a heads-up email:
wst@xecu.net
I would be most grateful for your advice.
God bless you all.
Bill Steo

I think the only one that meets your requirements is NoteMap from CaseSoft. It is a good outliner with a lot of great functions. You can download it and give it a whirl at

www.casesoft.com

Steve Z.

I think there are only three that meet your specifications: NoteMap 2 (http://www.casesoft.com Inspiration; and MS Word.

NoteMap is the more powerful outliner and probably has features comparable to Nota Bene, from the little I recall second-hand. What it doesn't have that you might want is a distinction within the outliner between text and headings. You can use the comment cards for text, but without formatting and text-manipulation options.

Inspiration notably lacks a hoist command, but does have a text/heading distinction. It has a major feature you may or not want, the ability to graphically represent an outline.

You are probably already familiar with the outliner in Word. While the least ergonomic and least powerful of the three, it has one very nice additional feature that standalone outliners should emulate: the ability to turn formatting of headings on and off with one click.

Stephen R. Diamond

Bill,

Have you looked at Wordperfect? You can upgrade to WP12 from almost any other wordprocessor going, including any version of MSWord or MSWorks.

Like NB the Outline is in the text, and can be customised to match any structure you want.

Having said that, my copy of NBWIN7 seems to give the options of using the structures you describe, so maybe I am missing the subtlety of what you are looking for.

Graham

I came across an organrizer with an academic emphasis that includes outlining with a I.A.1.a option: TakeNote. There seems to be no trial. It seems similar in many ways to ndxCards, but with a more narrowly academic emphasis. I would have liked to compare the outliners.

Stephen R. Diamond

Take a look at Inspiration 7.6 (www.inspiration.com). It does a pretty good job of importing outlines.

Steve,

I have never found the diagramming function in Inspiration all that >powerful either

When compared to what, I have just downloaded the demo in response to these postings and compared to the Mind Manager and Mind Genius, the diagramming tools seem a l;ot more powerful - for example you can work with concept maps in Inspiration which you can't in either of the other two.

I am also very impressed with the Palm version, which might just convince me that I reeally do need yet another outliner/mindmapping program.

I agree that the keystrokes for the Outliner are really weird. However, Keystrokes apart, are you saying that Inspiration is a real alternative to NoteMap.

Thanks,

Graham

I think the equivalent of ENTER in Inspiration is F9

I have just discovered that under the menu Utilities|Application Properties, you can set Inspiration up to use "Enter" to start a new topic.

So Enter will create a new sister topic and tab will indent it to turn it into a daughter topic.

I find that much more intuitive.

Graham

Steve

That certainly makes a difference. I orignially got Inspiration for the >diagramming. The outlining was just a bonus,

Well, I find that I like switching between a Mindmap and an outline for general idea generation and structure, but also find Concept diagrams useful for the same thing, so after ignoring Inspiration, I am finding it particularly useful. And the idea of having it on a Palm is really very attractive as my best thginking is done when I am not sat in front of a PC.

Graham