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

Posted by Chris Thompson
Sep 19, 2007 at 11:46 PM

The options for outliners that support footnotes directly are pretty limited, even without the auto-footnoting on paste that you describe (which I suspect you won’t find outside of Word).

If you have access to a Mac, take a look at Scrivener:
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
It’s one of the few outliners that supports both footnotes and marginalia directly. It also has a variety of other tools to support writers (e.g. you can view your outline as a corkboard for instance and rearrange index cards on the corkboard, it supports custom fields and columns for keeping track of section/chapter development, etc.). Unfortunately it’s a two pane outliner. I’m not aware of any current single pane outliners that support footnotes directly. Take a look at Scrivener though, it’s a good tool.

—Chris