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

Posted by williaq
Sep 27, 2007 at 05:39 AM

More evaluative thoughts for us all:

Clearly, some good software out there, each having has it’s own “take” on things:

ndxcards: looks like a good program; The interface was somewhat ‘modal’ and would take some getting used to; I believe (from my brief demo) that to capture references, sources have to be inputted via a card and appropriately linked
claris works: outlining is visually *very clean*—very nice, but hotkeys are unavailble for some of the common node-placement operations (move up, down, expand, collapse—at least i couldn’t find them, and I don’t think they are customizable) ; also, cutting and pasting from my libronix doesn’t automatically generate foonotes (this was possible with lotus smartsuite)
Looks like the bottom line for me (sigh, gasp) is that I’ll be working with MS Word for for now and working in “outline” view: Some factors that have led me to this point:
1) Can automatically capture citations / references and generate footnotes even as I paste citations into my outline
2) I can get around the clunky interface using VB scripts, and assigning to them to hotkeys (for instance, expand/collapse, moving nodes up/down/demote/promote)
3) I can then seamlessly move into the “word processing” mode (that is, final formatting, and prepping for print).

On the downside: visually, I personally find the outline view sort of hard on the eyes (would be nice to have an extra half-line of spacing between nodes, for instance)

I will keep looking. And if anyone stumbles on the ideal, or other candidates, throw in so we can all check things out, and learn =].

—Will