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A pipe dream: bare bones research writer's outliner and word processor?
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Posted by williaq
Sep 19, 2007 at 08:45 PM
Greets gang—
I’ve spent several hours now surfing and trialing products, but I’ve come up empty so far. I’d appreciate the collective wisdom of you all. My desires are actually very basic.
1) Easy placement and rearrangement of text elements—like ecco, or tkoutline
2) Text ‘folding’ of arbitrary branches, based on outline depth—again, like ecco (MS word has “outline view” but this is awkward to say the least)
3) Here is the kicker, that puts me into the word processor realm: Ability to automatically generate footnotes from pasted citations. If this doesn’t make sense, the functionality is in MS Word—I can copy text from a book in my Libronix software (an electronic library software), and the footnotes are automatically generated and captured when I paste into MSWord. (I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know the guts of how this happens—any education here might be helpful too)
4) Doesn’t cost a bundle
One perspective: I’m after an Ecco-like thing that accommodates footnoting
Another perspective: I’m after an word processor that provides a useable, stable, outlining mode and accommodates automatic footnoting.
Bottom line is that I’d like a tool that lets me easily organize a document, but also automatically accommodates citations / footnotes.
Ideas?
—Will
Posted by Cassius
Sep 19, 2007 at 11:08 PM
I have not used it in MANY years, but you might wish to try a demo of the Write module of Ability Office ver 4 at http://www.ability.com/ .
-c
Posted by Chris Thompson
Sep 19, 2007 at 11:46 PM
The options for outliners that support footnotes directly are pretty limited, even without the auto-footnoting on paste that you describe (which I suspect you won’t find outside of Word).
If you have access to a Mac, take a look at Scrivener:
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
It’s one of the few outliners that supports both footnotes and marginalia directly. It also has a variety of other tools to support writers (e.g. you can view your outline as a corkboard for instance and rearrange index cards on the corkboard, it supports custom fields and columns for keeping track of section/chapter development, etc.). Unfortunately it’s a two pane outliner. I’m not aware of any current single pane outliners that support footnotes directly. Take a look at Scrivener though, it’s a good tool.
—Chris
Posted by sracer
Sep 20, 2007 at 12:31 AM
I had been posting about this in one of the long threads. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for as well. Sadly, Tkoutline is probably the closest thing. I found a copy of the old DOS textmode PC-Outline on the internet. It made me sad… because it is exactly what I’m looking for, but it doesn’t have any useful export/import filters.
I just updated to the latest version of ListPro (primarily because it is the only application that has a desktop Windows and Windows Mobile smartphone counterparts) and it has decent outlining capabilities… I’m going to dig around a bit in it to see how well it works.
Posted by williaq
Sep 20, 2007 at 05:13 AM
Keep the feedback coming gang
Cassius—thanks for the tip—I’m downloading and trying Ability Write as I type… not looking optimistic from the feature descriptions, but it’s worth a look =\.
Chris—Scrivener does look good, though the negatives are the 2-pane layout (for writing, I’m definitely a single-pane guy), and that I don’t have Mac access
Sracer—I finally found a copy (like a needle in a haystack!) of pc-outline so I could read the documentation, but it doesn’t look like it handles citations / footnotes—this true? Listpro doesn’t look like a match for single-pane writing…
For a brief moment, I almost entertained trying to have tkoutline generate the xml tags for footnoting, etc, etc. But what am I thinking? I’m a hack programmer at best, and I need a *tool*, not another *project* right now!
Wow. I didn’t think that a “Single pane outliner with folding and footnotes” would be such a vacant niche! Woe is me. Seriously, keep the ideas coming gang.
—Will