MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Research-Heavy Writing

ATDrake · 09-01-2017, 04:01 PM

As far as the work file length goes, have you considered using an outliner technique?

This blogger mentions how it helped him assemble one of his books from all his research notes: How I use Outlines to Write Any Text and his blog specializes in discussing ways to organize and manage information as well as general writing advice.

As for the actual outliner, OmniOutliner is pretty good and has a few features you might find useful, such as the ability to attach notes to any row of text and automatically or selectively expand and collapse nested rows as well as only show those which contain certain key words upon show (the keywords can be in the notes if you want to keep them out of the actual text), which might be helpful to keep the visible document short so you don't have to do as much scrolling back and forth.

They have a new low-cost Essentials edition (with 14 day free trial) and the documentation can be read online here. The Pro version has extra niceties like attaching other document files and creating links between rows, plus more export formats.
As far as the RSI keyboard issues go, assuming you haven't already tried a text expander app, maybe that would make it better or worse if you could assign some easy shortcuts for stuff you type a lot?

Anyway, if you think you might be interested, assuming you're looking beyond what's already built into the Mac OS, I've found AText to be quite good and cheap and flexible, even if the developer apparently no longer responds to comments (though he does keep the direct-buy version of the app updated) and you have to look at the screenshots (or crib the TextExpander user manual) to set the expansions up.

09-01-2017, 04:01 PM	#2
ATDrake Wizzard Posts: 11,517 Karma: 33048258 Join Date: Mar 2010 Location: Roundworld Device: Kindle 2 International, Sony PRS-T1, BlackBerry PlayBook, Acer Iconia	As far as the work file length goes, have you considered using an outliner technique? This blogger mentions how it helped him assemble one of his books from all his research notes: How I use Outlines to Write Any Text and his blog specializes in discussing ways to organize and manage information as well as general writing advice. As for the actual outliner, OmniOutliner is pretty good and has a few features you might find useful, such as the ability to attach notes to any row of text and automatically or selectively expand and collapse nested rows as well as only show those which contain certain key words upon show (the keywords can be in the notes if you want to keep them out of the actual text), which might be helpful to keep the visible document short so you don't have to do as much scrolling back and forth. They have a new low-cost Essentials edition (with 14 day free trial) and the documentation can be read online here. The Pro version has extra niceties like attaching other document files and creating links between rows, plus more export formats. As far as the RSI keyboard issues go, assuming you haven't already tried a text expander app, maybe that would make it better or worse if you could assign some easy shortcuts for stuff you type a lot? Anyway, if you think you might be interested, assuming you're looking beyond what's already built into the Mac OS, I've found AText to be quite good and cheap and flexible, even if the developer apparently no longer responds to comments (though he does keep the direct-buy version of the app updated) and you have to look at the screenshots (or crib the TextExpander user manual) to set the expansions up.