Advice on research software

Posted by 22111
Aug 17, 2013 at 10:22 PM

CT appears very interesting, albeit I remind the (possibly needed) functionality of not only gathering paragraphs, but together with their respective “source info” (be that in a special first paragraph of that record or elsewhere).

As for relational databases, I perfectly understand that you could affect additional attributes and such to your records, in the form “records 1024 to 1038 all share a given attribute, making them a group, and their order in that group is specified by their record numbers”, and I also understand there could be a view in which these records 1024 to 1038 are all listed together, in a single pane.

But it appears more “natural” to me to have some “paper” as a unit/record, then break up its elements when needed, then breaking up such “papers” to begin with, and then recombining their elements into “group views”, but as you say, technically, this is perfectly possible, and also, to combine a “global” “source” record (here, number 1023) with such groups, and also, with any single “content” records in numerous combinations.

But I also assume that in such an environment, any coding or other editing / “thinking” about those mini-records will be rather cumbersome, meaning you will see a combination of records 1023 to 1038 in one pane, but I fear that for any editing of one of them, you’ll have to do that in an extra pane where it’s only record 1029.

Perhaps I didn’t grasp better possibilities in what you say, perhaps you could give specifics how to work with such bits in real life there?

But I’m not into pushing AS “at any price”: As for its defunct competitor which seems to be “better” or more apt for this task, is there any chance to obtain it somewhere? (Even with discontinued development?)

From my experience, trying to obtain defunct software from ebay (even worldwide) takes years and is not successful anyway, except in very rare exceptional cases, when it comes to rare software.

Btw, there is a German bibliographic software, Citavi, that gathers bits of text into new listings, but I fear it will not do it in the way that would be needed here.

MyInfo has got a function that allows for referencing single paragraphs, but no gathering of them whatsoever. In any case, it’s a functionality that would be very helpful for many purposes in traditional 2-pane outliners, and of which the programming would be rather simple, but which is not implemented often - I don’t know Zoot too much, so I cannot say if Zoot might indeed execute this task.