A pipe dream: bare bones research writer's outliner and word processor?

Posted by williaq
Sep 19, 2007 at 08:45 PM

Greets gang—

I’ve spent several hours now surfing and trialing products, but I’ve come up empty so far. I’d appreciate the collective wisdom of you all. My desires are actually very basic.

1) Easy placement and rearrangement of text elements—like ecco, or tkoutline

2) Text ‘folding’ of arbitrary branches, based on outline depth—again, like ecco (MS word has “outline view” but this is awkward to say the least)

3) Here is the kicker, that puts me into the word processor realm: Ability to automatically generate footnotes from pasted citations. If this doesn’t make sense, the functionality is in MS Word—I can copy text from a book in my Libronix software (an electronic library software), and the footnotes are automatically generated and captured when I paste into MSWord. (I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know the guts of how this happens—any education here might be helpful too)

4) Doesn’t cost a bundle

One perspective: I’m after an Ecco-like thing that accommodates footnoting
Another perspective: I’m after an word processor that provides a useable, stable, outlining mode and accommodates automatic footnoting.

Bottom line is that I’d like a tool that lets me easily organize a document, but also automatically accommodates citations / footnotes.

Ideas?
—Will