Teknoids

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 12:44 PM, William Andersen
wrote:
> This is a solo project, done on Word 2007 running in Windows XP Pro and will
> be using generally the Bluebook for citation form.

Then ignoring cost of acquisition, a Nota Bene Scholar's Workstation
would be my top recommendation, supplemented by the free West
CiteAdvisor tool when you get to the point of polishing the treatise
in Word to double-check citations for correct Bluebook citation format
and to assemble the table of authorities. See respectively
.
.
Note that the link to Nota Bene itself is broken on that first linked
page above. The correct link is here.
.

If you place any value on your time, the cost of Workstation
acquisition is actually an investment with a high return on your
investment. There is a time-limited demo version available for
download that is full-featured other than crippling the ability to
print. Pricing for scholars is $349, for students $249.

Workstation is an all-in one integrated solution for the solo task you
describe, with the final product exportable via RTF (Rich Text Format)
to Word (or to other word processors) for final polishing and use of
features not available in Workstation such as a paginated and indexed
table of authorities and paginated subject matter index generation in
Word format. (Pagination will change after being read into Word.)

In a rough tie for a distant second place, I'll add my voice to
Laura's in favor of Citation 9,
, with the Zotero Firefox
2.x-plus extension as a free alternative. .

However, both of the latter put you into patchwork solution mode.
E.g., neither has strong outlining capabilities nor provides a
solution for such tasks as document and version management. I know of
no solution for the totality of your task using those two apps that
would not introduce unacceptable risk of data loss in switching
between tools connected with bubble gum and baling wire.

The Zotero plug-in for Firefox is a very nice tool if you are in the
market for a free alternative to Citation 9. I use Zotero as a web
research assistant for minor research and writing projects but would
not use it were I to launch another treatise writing project (May I
please be spared from that task again in my remaining life. I love my
retirement and the freedom from mega-projects that rule my life. :-)

Zotero does have support for Blue Book citation format available as an
installable download. (under the "B"
section.) I have not tested that CLS so do not know its quality.

I actually prefer Zotero over Citation because it is browser-based and
makes it dirt simple to store a snapshot copy of the document the cite
and/or note pertains to in the database along with the citation and
note, whether a web page or a PDF.

If a large part of your research is done online, it's incredibly handy
to have a copy of the source material right at hand for checking,
quoting, etc. And to the extent you might deal with data on web pages
that might disappear later, it's a very handy and easy way of
preserving a date and time-stamped snapshot of your original source
document.

Neither Zotero, Citation, nor Word are anything to brag about for
outlining purposes. Moreover, the Word document formats are not
designed for any other application to round-trip documents with Word.

One may send an outline to Word; getting it back to the outliner after
editing in Word tends to be a process in which data is lost because
Word writes to a richer vocabulary in its own file formats. (Word is
far from unique among powerful word processors in this trait.)

I know of only one outliner that claims an ability to round-trip
outlines with Word 2007 without data loss, the Mindjet mindmap
outliner. . But it does its magic in large
part via the OOXML formats that are destined for major revision as
discussed below, so I cannot recommend it for a lengthy project.

>From a production standpoint, the most feasible approach I know of for
a large treatise is to do the work in an integrated solution like Nota
Bene, export to Word, then do final work there as necessary, such as
creation of a correctly-paginated table of authorities and subject
matter index.

Regardless of the way you go, I also suggest that you consider setting
the Word 2003 binary DOC format as the default for your project.

The Word 2007 binary and OOXML formats are not stable, with
substantial revision planned as a result of changes made in the OOXML
specification at ISO/IEC. (The Word binary formats are a binary dump
to file of the in-memory binary representation ("IMBR") of a document
and OOXML is a conversion and export from the IMBR, so the Word 2007
formats as adapted in Word 2009 will need to change far beyond simple
addition of metadata for new features in that version of Word. The
avalanche of changes in OOXML made by ISO/IEC will also need to be
incorporated.)

There will undoubtedly be at least initial bugs in the conversion of
the existing Word 2007 formats in their present state to the
heavily-revised versions of them coming in Word 2009 (assuming it is
released on schedule).

So holding the line at the Word 2003 DOC binary format gives you a
more stable format to work from for a lengthy and large project. But
this is an area where your publisher may have requirements.

Another suggestion is frequent backups of the project. Word really
doesn't handle large documents very well. They tend to corrupt fairly
easily. Even with a tool more suitable for large, complex documents
like WordPerfect, my rule of thumb is that the more time I have into a
project and the closer to the deadline, the more frequently I back up
to a different drive.

E.g., when nearing completion and the deadline for submission of an
opening appellate brief, before my retirement I used a WordPerfect
script that automatically creates a copy on a separate drive every
time I save the document. That was still not wholly satisfactory
because of the lack of document versioning, but it saved my bacon more
than once. One thing I like very much about Nota Bene Workstation is
that it does version saved documents.

Like any complex application, the Workstation tools do have a learning
curve. But it requires little experience to become immediately
productive and the rest can be learned when and as needed.

Workstation is also useful far beyond the drafting of a single
treatise. It is the premier academic writing and research tool and has
been since the DOS days. It is designed so that you need never enter
the same citation and note twice in a career. The built-in search
capabilities allow fairly instant retrieval and addition of citations
and notes to a new document and its unique bibliography.

Word processors are about general purpose writing. Nota Bene is about
*academic* writing AND research. It is the most appropriate tool for
your project that I know of.

Best regards,

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. (Marbux)

--
Universal Interoperability Council