Word Processors: Outlines, Main Text and Footnotes

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 5160

Posted by cacx1999
2006-02-06 12:58:50

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

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