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A pipe dream: bare bones research writer's outliner and word processor?
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Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Sep 20, 2007 at 06:13 PM
>I’ve done a few exhaustive searches over the months, and a single pane outliner for Windows with modest outlining capabilities simply doesn’t exist. I keep hoping that I overlooked one
Have you tried SQLNotes (code name) It is in beta right now, so you can download a free copy. It has both single pane and dual pane outlining. It takes the Ecco Pro concepts and brings it further. Check-out all the features on http://www.sqlnotes.net.
Posted by Cassius
Sep 20, 2007 at 09:54 PM
It’s been two decades since I used it, but has anyone lookd at Word Perfect?
-c
Posted by Chris Thompson
Sep 21, 2007 at 02:38 AM
Will, if you have some programming skills, any outliner that supports character styles and some form of flexible export could probably be customized to your needs. I know it’s Mac-only, but just as an example, OmniOutliner lets you apply character styles (so you could define a “footnote” style) and its export function allows you to define an XSLT to transform the output however you like. Since the character styles are marked in the XML, it’s pretty trivial to write an XSLT that takes the regions tagged “footnote” and does whatever you want with them. There’s even an example LaTeX exporter that does this in the OO SDK, so you wouldn’t be reinventing the wheel.
—Chris
williaq wrote:
>Keep the feedback coming gang
>
>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
Posted by sracer
Sep 21, 2007 at 03:36 AM
I just remembered. My favorite integrated app (AppleWorks/ClarisWorks for Windows) supports outlines! Outlines in the word processing module capable of folding/hiding/collapsing and manipulating outline entries. Although I purchased it (and updates) back in the day, it is now abandonware and is available for free downloading. (just do a google search)
It has rich import/export filters capable of importing/exporting Word files. More stuff to play with. ;-)
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Sep 21, 2007 at 05:23 AM
Have you tried ndxcards? It formats footnotes as part of its bibliographic capacity. (I haven’t used this functionality, but it would seem it supports only bibliographic footnotes. Perhaps you need a broader footnoting ability.) It has an outliner that does most of what you want. One-pane, in its own way.
williaq wrote:
>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
>