custom fields right into the notes area via {fieldname} placeholders

Posted by Dr Andus
Jul 15, 2014 at 05:46 PM

donleone wrote:
Does anybody know some outliners / info-managers,
>that are able to insert custom fields data right into their notes area
>itself,
>such as for example via {placeholders} in sentences and the like…

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but three features come to mind in ConnectedText:

1) Inclusion (transclusion): you can insert one document (or a part of a document) in the body of another document, so that when you make changes in the source document, the changes are automatically propagated to all the other documents that contain that inclusion. You can do this by using this markup: ((title_of_source_document))

You could assemble tables with such inclusions, but it would be a very manual process.

2) Attributes/properties: you can mark up text up to 256 characters with an attribute or property, and then you can insert a query expression into the body of a document that will pull all those marked-up passages and render them in a table.

E.g. [[$SUMMARY:|+year|title|Author]] would create a table that automatically builds and updates a bibliography with links to the documents in the first column, and then the marked-up elements in the next columns, in this case ‘publication year,’ ‘publication title, ‘authors’). The plus sign means its ordered in a descending chronological order.

This is a lot more automated process than 1).

3) There is also something called “Named blocks” that allows for overlapping annotations (i.e. one part of the passage is marked with one “name,” another part with another “name” that can partially or entirely overlap the previously marked passage.

This is a lot more complex process than 1) and 2).

But all of this is achieved with wiki markup, so it’s not as ‘graphical’ a process as with Zoot, for instance.