NoteBook Community - Writing an essay in NoteBook

Writing an essay in NoteBook

by ptram - 10:01PM, Apr 15, 2009

Hi,

Since my next public speech at the university will contain a lot of multimedia files, I decided to use NoteBook as a blackboard (well, white actually), and do my presentation with a “local” web site generated by NB.

So, with the help of the many examples in CP’s own web site and in this forum, I decided to write my essay entirely in NB, bypassing my usual other apps like Scrivener or Nisus Writer.

I started, as usual, by collecting notes from the web in various Note pages; transcribing lessons and annotating books and essays with Cornell note pages; and, finally, slowly creating an outline of my essay in a Note page.

When I had to convert my outline to a set of Writing pages and Dividers, I discovered I had to do it line by line and page by page, since there is no apparent way to (semi-)automatically convert an outline page to a set of pages reflecting the same nested structure of an outline. This would have been very sought-after in this situation.

How do others do this kind of things?

Paolo

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ptram

Member

12:34PM, Apr 16, 2009

I reply to myself. Probably, when the first draft (or the whole work) is to be done in NoteBook, it is better to consider writing the outline in the Divider page, that will become the table of content of the final essay.

This would actually create the pages where one will be writing. Any extensive note to an item would be entered directly into the writing page, thus making the outline lighter and cleaner than my usual mix of headings/inline notes.

Shame is you cannot actually copy (or export) the outline from a Divider page, and paste it to a word processor for exporting just an outline to be discussed separately from the text.

The best I can do, now, is to export a whole section as RTF, open it with a wordprocessor and delete everything in the middle of the outline items. With Nisus Writer this is easy, since you can use the Ruler > Select All function to select only lower-level paragraphs and delete them.

— Last edited 12:41PM, Apr 16, 2009