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A pipe dream: bare bones research writer's outliner and word processor?
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Posted by williaq
Sep 20, 2007 at 05:20 AM
Update—
I just had a look at Ability Write 4. It appears impressively executed, but No Go as far as outlining. No mention of outlining in the user manual, no MSWord-esque “outline view”. Sigh.
—Will
Posted by Jack Crawford
Sep 20, 2007 at 08:26 AM
It’s a crying shame that PageFour does not offer outlining capabilities. While outlining gets mentioned in its promotional material, it offers the barest of bullet and number list functionality.
PageFour with a NoteMap type outlining capability would be a killer program for writing purposes.
Jack
Posted by Bob Mackreth
Sep 20, 2007 at 12:25 PM
Jack Crawford wrote:
>It’s a crying shame that PageFour does not offer outlining capabilities. While
>outlining gets mentioned in its promotional material, it offers the barest of bullet
>and number list functionality.
>
>PageFour with a NoteMap type outlining capability
>would be a killer program for writing purposes.
I’ll second and third that!
There’s a lot I like about PageFour, but I gave up on it precisely because of its less-than-impressive outlining capability.
Bob
Posted by Matty
Sep 20, 2007 at 04:04 PM
This is exactly what I have been looking for as well, but I have become convinced that MS Word is really the only game in town for outlining with footnotes. It is far from perfect, but, once you get the hang of it works ok. One of the keys to using the outlining mode effectively is formatting your document using styles, something that I only learned about recently. Like everyone else, I am awaiting something better,
Matt
Posted by sracer
Sep 20, 2007 at 05:54 PM
williaq wrote:
>Keep the feedback coming gang
>
> 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…
On the surface, ListPro doesn’t appear to support that. However it DOES have TKOutline-like capabilities within a particular “list”. ListPro uses an outline/tree like structure (the lefthand panel) to organize various lists. But you can configure an individual “list” to operate as an outline.
Here’s a screenshot I took of what I’m talking about: http://www.divshare.com/download/2045627-e01
In this example, “Sample Outline” is a “list”. The panel on the lower right is where text for the outline entry will appear. In that sense, it is a 2-pane outliner.
The reason why I’m giving ListPro another shot (I’ve used it off and on over the years) is because it is the only tool with desktop PC and smartphone components (simply sync or transfer data between the two), and since I like TKOutline, the ability to have similar functions embedded in a personal data organizer is helpful. (I currently use KeyNote as my data organizer).
>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!
I’m a developer by profession… and I’ve used TCL (and TK, Expect) in my travels. If I can manage to get TCL to run on my WindowsMobile 6 smartphone, then I plan to work on tkoutline to include some additional functionality.
>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.
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.