This workflow could of course be further simplified, as you could simply use CT’s Outline pane and its view pane as the dual-pane outliner in steps 4 and 5, altogether leaving out Freeplane. All the while I’m following and ticking off the branches of the mind map and copying across selected quotes and notes from the associated CT topics. as soon as I write a larger chunk of text, I add headings and sub-headings to it to crystalise the final implicit logical structure (outline) of the emerging draft. In my main monitor, I fire up Outline 4D (aka StoryView) and start writing my draft, while also using O4D’s outlining functionalities for almost real-time reverse outlining, i.e.Effectively Freeplane and CT have been integrated to form a funky “dual-pane” outliner, where the first pane is a mind map, and the second pane is the viewer for the note/quote attached to individual mind map items. my outline) and the corresponding quotes and notes in CT. When I’m finished with outlining and am ready to begin to write the draft, I tile Freeplane and CT vertically in my second (22in) monitor, so I can look at both the mind map (i.e.I can add further notes using Freeplane’s own Notes functionality and develop and restructure the outline, if I wish. Nodes with links remain clickable, which means that clicking on a particular Freeplane node with a link opens up the corresponding quote or note in CT. The CT outline has been thus transformed into a mind map. I export the CT outline as a Freemind (.mm) file and import it into Freeplane (a mind map application).Clicking on the outline item opens the corresponding quote. Whenever I create a new topic with a quote or note using the process described in point 2, I add a corresponding item to the outline and drag and drop this new topic on it, which creates a hyperlink between the outline item and the selected quote or note. Simultaneously to this process I create an outline for the intended draft using CT’s own Outline tool.When I come across an important or interesting quote or note, I select the text and type CTRL+ALT+/ to activate Manfred Kuehn‘s “copy to new topic with link” AutoHotkey script (see below), which copies the selected text, creates a new CT topic with it, and also inserts a link under the original text to this new topic. As I am reviewing the document, I identify key quotes and notes that I would like to consider as material for the draft.I import quotes and notes into ConnectedText (CT) as I’ve described elsewhere, using my latest reading notes template.However, recently I’ve come up with a simplified workflow that ‘only’ requires three pieces of software: ConnectedText, Freeplane, and Outline 4D (aka StoryView). I’ve experimented with various set-ups to tackle this process in the past that involved a lot of different pieces of software (see here and here). Let me know if a screen shot would be helpful and I can show what this looked like in Freeplane.A large part of the academic writing process has to do with taking notes, collecting quotes, analysing and evaluating them, coming up with your own interpretation, then developing an outline, and finally writing up the material into a draft. For that use case, it’s much nicer if the menu stays put as different notes are opened/closed/scrolled. I mostly treat my list like a navigation menu for selecting notes to view. Even for short notes I’d prefer that my list doesn’t “jump around” as I expand and collapse different notes. Currently if I scroll through a note that is more than one screen in length, I lose visibility of the entire rest of my list (which I would prefer not to). The main benefit of showing notes in Split mode instead of in line is the ability to scroll through long notes without scrolling your list off the screen. Could be a different color or icon or something. It would be convenient if the list items on the left gave some indication of whether there is a note attached. The split could also be horizontal, which might work better for display on phones or if there is eventually a feature to allow multiple document panels on the same screen. The two sides would need to be scrollable independently. In the new “Split” mode, the document panel could be split in two vertically with the left side showing the list (no notes) and the right side showing the note of the active list item. The view modes for notes could be: In Line (formerly Show), 1st Line, Hide, or Split (new). In Freeplane it was possible to change the view mode such that the note attached to the active node was displayed in a side pane.Īs an avid user of notes (sometimes very long ones) in Dynalist, a side pane would be my preferred way of viewing/editing notes. I like Dynalist better in almost all respects except one. I used to use a mindmapping tool, Freeplane, as an outliner before I found Dynalist.
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