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Single-pan Outliner for Writers
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Posted by DaXiong
Dec 9, 2007 at 01:34 AM
A lot of posts recently have lamented the lack of single-pane outliners, especially outliners serving writers. What I haven’t seen are solutions people here are using.
What single-pane outliners are people using for writing?
I write as part of my job - figure a 30 minute speech every week. Currently, I use Inspiration 8 (windows), and find it useful, but not perfect. I don’t use the mind-mapping feature (not my thing), but as an outliner it is great. What is lacking is control over formatting (and the company making it doesn’t really seem to care about user feedback!)
Why don’t software companies let users control the style in outlines?
I’ve used ECCO Pro in the past (but not for 10 years now), it deserves its praise, but it too is crippled in output control. I’ve seen the posts about SQLNotes, but haven’t used it. Honestly, although it claims to be similar to ECCO Pro, I see it as a PIM, information collector, not writing outliner (and it appears advertised this way too.)
Am I missing something? Are there programs out there in the Mac/Linux world that are designed for outlining for writers?
Thanks
DaXiong
Posted by Bob Mackreth
Dec 9, 2007 at 06:23 PM
I use NoteMap for most of my composition, then cut and paste the text to Word for final polishing. NoteMap’s outliner features are pretty powerful; certainly enough for my needs. Formatting transfers to Word reasonably well.
As a long-time ECCO user, I find working in NoteMap very comfortable.
There are several negatives to point out before I’d recommend NoteMap too enthusiastically, though:
1. It’s expensive, with a list price of $150 last time I checked. Watch for special deals, though: I picked my copy up for half-price during a sale.
2, There’s a long-standing bug that interferes with the built-in “Export to Word” function. I work around this with cut and paste.
3. The original developer sold out to Lexis Nexis a year ago or so, and the new owners seem uninterested in further development. Others have posted here that Lexis Nexis does not make much money from the program, and have no interest in marketing it more effectively to improve the situation.
Posted by Cassius
Dec 9, 2007 at 06:41 PM
Bob Mackreth wrote:
>I use NoteMap for most of my composition, then cut and paste the text to Word for final polishing. ...
>2, There’s a long-standing bug that interferes with the built-in “Export to Word” function. I work around this with cut and paste.
There is an easy way to bypass the “export to Word” bug: Export to rtf and then open the rtf file in Word.
This would be so easy to program into NoteMap that I have to believe that there will be no further NoteMap development.
-c
Posted by Cassius
Dec 9, 2007 at 06:41 PM
Bob Mackreth wrote:
>I use NoteMap for most of my composition, then cut and paste the text to Word for final polishing. ...
>2, There’s a long-standing bug that interferes with the built-in “Export to Word” function. I work around this with cut and paste.
There is an easy way to bypass the “export to Word” bug: Export to rtf and then open the rtf file in Word.
This would be so easy to program into NoteMap that I have to believe that there will be no further NoteMap development.
-c
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Dec 9, 2007 at 07:14 PM
Could you clarify what you mean with regard to Inspiration lacking formatting capability, as the user can set formats for levels and apply formatting directly to text elements?