Not an Outliner or remotely connected to anything I have been asking about recently, but Rough Draft is a "now" free word processor with few features, but nicely implemented. That is maybe unfair as it is actually much cleverer than it looks.

Its all of a 1.2Mb down load and fairly light on resources at about 1100k memory usage. Natively uses RTF, but will open, but not save Word and Wordperfect files.

For someone who just writes, and doesn't need to work with graphics or figure numbers, or page layouts, cross references etc this looks a really useful tool. It has a side bar that gives access to clips, symbols, files and searche details. Open files use tabs for easy access. Well worth having a look at.

And while I am talking about Word Processors, the other nice program I have found is TextMaker 2006, well implmented low cost, fast and low resources word processor, under 4000k mem usage http://www.softmaker.com/english/product_en.htm

I have been moving a complex word document, tables graphics, headers footers TOC, and frames, between Word and Text Maker and adding comments and tracking changes in both programs and it has worked perfectly. The same document fell apart moving it into Open Office 2.01. And until now OOo had the best Word Filters I had come across.

The file takes 12 seconds to open in Word, but even allowing for the conversion process, took 4 seconds to open in TextMaker. Even more impressive is that even after the file has opened in Word, Word still chunters on building the graphics, and you cannot immediately scroll through the document. In TextMaker the file was properly opened in the 4secs and you could instantly scroll to the end of the document.

And a final comment on Word Processors, becasue it cropped up recently, Open Office is very good at opening corrupted Word and Excel files.

I don't seem to get sent as many corrupt files as I used to, and I had forgotten about this until someone sent me a Word file that I couldn't open, it was sent again and I still couldn't open it. However, it opened fine in OOo, where I could save it as a Word file that Word could then open. It works well for Excel files as well and worth while keeping around for this purpose, even if you don't use it for anything else.

Graham

Graham,

A word processor I am trialing right now is worth a look:
http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/

The developers are very active and responsive; their forum is also very active with 509 members. Atlantis is the best I've seen for ease of use features. The only downside is no tables but they are scheduled for implementation this year.

Al Cantley

Through long experience with MS WORD, including the creation of documents with tables, graphics and equations, I NEVER create a long document in the form of a single file. WORD file corruption is a far-to-frequent occurrence, and once corruption occurs in even a small part of a WORD document it tends to metastasize throughout the document, sometimes making the entire document unrecoverable to a "clean" state. Cutting and pasting into a new, blank document often just transfers the infection.

Another danger occurs in emailing the document. Fonts and formatting are frequently changed...and, unless you read the entire document, you may not aware of these corruptions.

I produce complex documents in sections/chapters with each as a separate WORD file and then zip them together into one compressed file.

-sc

Rough Draft is a very neat word processor. I have found it hard to choose between it and KeyNote (alas, no longer under development), which I use for a variety of small tasks.

There was an earlier discussion of TextMaker at the end of September, I recall, while the new TextMaker 2006 was still in beta. Like you, I am very impressed by its ability to handle quite complex Word files (footnotes, tracking, comments, tables, etc) and allow them to be passed to and fro between the two programs.

I am tempted to buy TM but, since I have an institutional (i.e. free) copy of Word 2003, I am finding it hard to justify the additional outlay. If I didn't have Word, however, and needed to work with those who did, TM would be a very attractive proposition.

Derek

Everyone,

Ok,you have now teased me out of lurking. I've followed this site for ages having been completely OC (Obsessive / Compulsive) about outliners and personal knowledge management for years, using everything (and, unfortunately usually buying) and building my own.

But you have succeeded in pulling me in because of a word processing topic. Who would have thought? Anyway, the reason for my post is to try and stimulate a discussion on styles in word processing and outliners. I started in the good old days of IBM's SCRIPT and the father of SGML, HTML and XML called GML - Generalized Markup Language. What I really liked was that you marked up WHAT something is (a paragraph, an ordered list, a heading ... gee, HTML)not how it should look. Then it is up to the computer to lay it out attractively. And, of course, a change in the style definitions changes everything rather than a tedious task of hand updates.

I know Word and other processors can handle styles but they make it obscure, difficult, worst of all they give the (naive)user an opportunity to really mess things up. They really don't encourage style use. I envision a WP that is very easy to use and very easy to tag with styles. Perhaps mostly plain text but with the ability to see styled text if you would like. I suspect text entry and manipulation could be much faster with the computationally intensive work at the back, formatting end. I know computers can do a good job in placing text and graphics TeX can do it. Perhaps I'm just a throwback to days before WYSIWYG but I'm not convinced it was that much a step forward.

Outliners don't seem to even give a thought to styles. I've even built a Word macro so I can write in Brainstorm and provide hints (for example an h. or o. to indicate a header or ordered list, <e> for emphasized). The macro is smart enough to assume that text at the "bottom" of the hierarchy is "body text" but the .h allows flagging something that should be a header with nothing below it yet. Needless to say the result is tagged with the appropriate built in Word paragraph or character styles. Thus a simple change of template and the document is re-formatted nicely. I haven't really written much with this yet but it looks promising.

I also have NoteMap 2 which I like but was shocked to find doesn't use styles when exporting to Word (and I thought if anybody used styles it was lawyers).

So, thoughts??

Charles