Okay, here's a more on-topic question:

There has been some discussion in this forum about word processors.

Does anyone know a way to do the following:
Having the outline of a document display in one pane, with the ability to fold/unfold, rearrange etc, the main text in another (probably bigger) pane, and the footnotes in another pane (so they don't clutter the main text, but are still visible)? I don't need the main text to be in layout mode (which is unnessecary for writing anyway, IMO) and would prefer something like Word's "normal" mode (with additional footnotes pane) plus an additional outline pane.

Something like a three-pane outliner with footnotes. Unfortunately, it seems like almost no good outliner is able to do footnotes.

I tried several word processors, but to no avail. You can have two Word windows of the same document open and do something like I described, but the main text won't jump to the part you handled in the outline and vice versa (and somehow, I don't trust Word when accessing the same document from two different windows). OpenOffice Writer has a "Navigator", but you can't rearrange anything in it.

Operating system is not important (could be Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever, even an obsolete one like OS/2, Mac OS 9) if it fulfills this requirement. But it should be able to export to RTF/DOC or anything other compatible (not PDF) for final formatting and archiving.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance
Alex

One thing I forgot to mention: Mellel is available in around 20 different languages (e.g. German, Greek and Spanish) and can write from left to right and right to left.

Bye, Franz

Hi.

My original post seems to have vanished. Therefore: 2. attempt.

Mellel for Mac OS X could be what you are looking for.

More on the software under www.redlers.com, a screenshot showing the outliner windows next to the editing window is here: http://www.redlers.com/images/screenshots/screenshot020.jpg

Hope it helps, Franz

You can have two Word windows of the same document open and do something like I described, but the main text won't jump to the part you handled in the outline and vice versa.

Have you tried MS Word's Document Map? It is available in version 2003 (at least) and it works like a two-pane outliner, i.e you can navigate in the outline and the right pane, which can be either normal or layout, will display the respective text and vice versa.

alx

@ Alex D.: I don't have hands-on experience with Word 2003 (only 97, 98 and 2000), but I used the document map for long documents with Version 97, 98 and 2000, and Word could *not* show the document map and the footnotes at the same time. And the document map was nothing more than a "navigator", not an outliner. Did that change?
And back then, Word was notorious (in my own experience) for rearranging the document structure, changing levels of the outline and even of the pure basic text at will, renumbering the headers in crazy ways, wrong positioning of images and the like. Thie was especially annoying when trasferring document between machines (like, between a Mac with Word 98 and a PC with 97).
From what I've read, Word 2003 still can't handle long documents containting tables, footnotes and pictures properly (e.g. I read a comparison in the well-respected German magazine "c't" where Word 2003, WordPerfect and WordPro all failed miserably with long, complex documents, while StarOffice, Textmaker and Papyrus were much better). So I wonder if it makes sense to throw any cash at yet another version of Word.

@ Franz: I just downloaded Mellel and will give it a test drive on my b/w G3. But although I said OS doesn't matter, I'd actually preferred something that runs on a PC (Windows/Linux/something), as I only have two broken OS X-capable and portable Macs (iBook, Pismo) while I have several working Wintel laptops (and a Powerbook 3400c which I won't dare to put OS X on).

(BTW, the formatting tools in the form for posts don't seem to work in Opera.)

Franz, I tried Mellel, and found out that it can't do what I'm searching for. I even initiated a thread at the Mellel forum, and some developers confimed that it is not possible. See here: <http://forum.redlers.com/viewtopic.php?t=266&gt

BTW: The formatting tools for forum posts work even less in Firefox than in Opera. They're not even visible in FF. :-(

Stephen,

can you tell me since which version Word is dependable with long documents? I've been thinking for a while now about buying a copy of Office 2002/XP because there were some improvements (to be more precise: multiple selection in Word and virtual folders in Outlook, although I'm not sure whether the latter isn't a flawed concept overall). And I never really dared to test v2000 with really long documents (100s of pages); I had FrameMaker for that, professionally, and no need for this kind of documents, personally. Now I need them, personally. I definitely don't want v2003 for some reasons that are OT to discuss here, but 2002/XP would be a possibility (and I have v. X for the Mac, I almost forgot that one, because I never use it; the only Mac OS X I use at the moment acts as some kind of server).

One of my major gripes with Word, however, is that its file format seems to have a very strange "container" model where you keep not knowing where exactly you're placing your foot in at the moment. So it keeps changing formattings, hierarchy levels and the like for no apparent reason. You can't always rely on styles when you need to edit something. There are always strange things happening. And since the file format hasn't changed for a long time (save for MS's obscure implementation of XML in some of the latest versions), I doubt that things might have improved.

Graham,

thanks, nice read, but it misses some crucial points.
First, I can find no reference to "XML" or "DTD" in that document (which I found out, BTW, to be a republication of a 2004 Newsforge article - what problem do all those people on the web have with dates? Sometimes you even find the day and month of an article or post, but not the year! But most often, you'll find an automatically generated date of today which has nothing to do with the date the article was written).
Even worse, we use not XML (which is fairly common these days) but SGML (and a pretty old version of "FrameMaker+SGML", before Adobe incorporated structured documents into a single "FrameMaker" product). This is one of those business decisions that originate at some point in history and are very tough to change. We're talking about the whole database of a leading publishing house here. And I'm glad I'm not in charge of all that :-)
The article is a quite short-sighted comparison from a desktop-publishing point of view. FrameMaker *is* a rather lame and outdated desktop publishing application. But it is very reliable (although we did encounter some annoying quirks over the years, but *much* less than in Word - and we do 95% work in FrameMaker, 5% in Word). And it is very integrated into a semi-automated workflow here that should not be tampered with.
And in some contexts it doesn't really matter if a licence costs 2000$ or nothing. I wish some MBA types would understand that correctly.

But all that wasn't the subject of the OP and the intention of this thread. That should be more about outlining and creative/academic writing ;-)