Some outliners and the features Unicode, search in the tree, website publishing

Posted by 22111
Nov 30, 2013 at 03:46 PM

Peter,

I would by no means want to invalidate all the valuable advice we’ve got in-between. Some further remarks not connected to that.

Some weeks ago, I had started another thread, called “Viewers? eBook Creators?” = http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5141

and in which I also mused about html with trees and pdf.

One very important of pdf is the following one: It’s accepted by non-customers, i.e. by prospects, whilst eBooks are not, by the latter: In many corporations, it is not even possible for your correspondent to download an .exe file which you might have added as an appendix to your mail, and this even after having had some telephone conversations with him: The net in his corporation prevents him from looking into your .exe stuff.

For people who don’t want to go into rather advanced scripting (in JavaScript), and buy Adobe Acrobat Prof., there are not so many alternatives to do good pdf, from outlining, i.e. there is no (free or paid) “translation tool” available to my knowledge.

On the other hand, you can go by Word, and here I must do some minor “scripting” - replacing text components by others, simply - in the html export file I get from my outliner, and which then I import into Word (where even the old 2003 version works admirably) - I go by html and not by .rtf since my outliner does not do really stable rtf export, but produces html files (= plain text files with simple markup for formatting, etc.) without flaws.

When I speak of “scripting”, you can simply import the html plain text file into any editor and then do the necessary text replacements, the “scripting” part just being there for doing that in a batch, instead of repeatedly and manually inserting the necessary “replace x by y” terms into “global replace” dialogs.

I do not really explain the workflow here: http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/nitro-pro-9 but I give enough details in order show that it is really simple, the trick being creating styles in Word, but only for those elements (e.g. every item in your outliner = every new page in the final pdf) of which, from Word, your pdf creation software (from 19 dollars today if you buy Abbyy pdf Transformer these days, even from their own page, which will give them full price and not only 9.50 dollars if you buy from bits) will then create the necessary bookmarks (and only those you want to be created).

As for html-with-tree, I looked into all the possible alternatives, and it’s either outliner-with-export-to-html-with-tree, or some real scripting, and getting some tree component, of which some are free, and some cost (within a necessary bundle) over 1,000 dollars (but the result you’ll get is really beautiful then).

Of course, there is always the alternative to create such a html compound instead of an .exe file, even for prospects, and even without general web access.

As for html-with-tree created by outliners, proprietary outliner add-ins or proprietary outliner add-ons, there is always the possibility to then tweak the html code those tools will have created (and again in any simple plain text editor of your choice, by “global replace”), i.e. you’ll preserve the tree (which will have been the reason you will have used those proprietary tools to begin with), but you will perhaps be able to visually enhance some elements of it, delete abundant “created with xyz” notifications, and so on - the problems here would mostly be on the legal side since it’s perfectly possible that you simply will not have the right to tweak what you will have got by some add-in/add-on tool; I’ll have to take a look into these questions because I myself am wondering if that could be the “best” solution for my own publishing needs here since free tree components are really as ugly most of the time, and some beautiful paid ones are, as said, really expensive.

Also, there might be special solutions for “Word to html-with-tree”, free or paid, and which up to now I might have overlooked since I only searched for general ones which would have avoided Word as the intermediate step.

In the end, Word, by its ubiquity, has created a new reality of its own, so lately I’ve come more and more to the acceptance of Word as the necessary unavoidable intermediate step, since this greatly enhances my possibilities.