Man in Search of a Method

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 7, 2009 at 08:06 AM

I also favour plain text for writing more than anything (except, on accasions, pen and paper). I will only write in Word if there’s nothing else available and, even then, I will only use formatted headings to simulate structure and as placeholders, i.e. “such content goes here”.

Brainstorm (http://www.brainstormsw.com) is my program of choice and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to work with complex structures. The only thing I have found comparable in power are personal wikis but I am personally not attracted to the wiki concept. Brainstorm includes an MS Word macro that makes it easy to export your work to Word in a structured manner (unfortunately it has trouble in non-English versions of Windows/Office). Note that Brainstorm Software is now under new ownership and it may be a while before development resumes, but the program is very mature (it actualy has more than twenty years of history behind it, starting out in DOS).

Another program that I find very powerful (also with DOS roots) but am still learning is MaxThink (http://www.maxthink.org). It has been fairly discussed at this forum so you should be able to find others’ impressions of it; I recall that our lawyer members seemed to appreciate it :-) I do suggest that you download and try it, and also view the various tutorial videos available, as it has some fairly complex capabilities in (re)arranging text. It has a very good Word import/export feature, the best I’ve seen in such a program.