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

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Sep 21, 2007 at 05:23 AM

Have you tried ndxcards? It formats footnotes as part of its bibliographic capacity. (I haven’t used this functionality, but it would seem it supports only bibliographic footnotes. Perhaps you need a broader footnoting ability.) It has an outliner that does most of what you want. One-pane, in its own way.

williaq wrote:
>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
>