DT for writing

Delighted to read the DT 2.0 status announcment. Great! – I’ve been using DT Pro for almost a year now; it has changed my way of working with text and research-materials beyond of what I could describe here. I continue to be delighted with the app and keep finding new things.

On hearing that v 2.0 at this stage is still gathering features I feel encouraged to chip in my list of wishes. – I would love using DT to do my draft writing; when trying to use it in this way, there are several small things that would make it a lot more friendly to my writing process:
• Handling of footnotes is a can’t do without
• a split-view-feature that enables viewing the same doc at two different places (see Scrivener or Ulysses); alternatively the option to open two instances of the same document could help.
• a margin’s column to allow for marginal comments (as in Jer’s)
• being able to link words with other words (inside DT)
• delighted to read that my next point is already on the features list: external links to DT-docs :slight_smile:
• being able to minimize the width of text-windows beyond the current (fixed) minimal width
• anything that minimises beachballing when opening and handling individual rtf docs or windows; despite 2GB of RAM my MBP the database (>1GB, 10.000.000words) does quite a bit of this.

Maybe I’ve missed out on some of the more nifty features ? If not I would suspect that I’m not alone with these wishes.

Thanks!

kithairon

Thanks for the suggestions! Verson 2.0 will support external linking (including links between databases of course), reduce the memory usage and multiple databases. This will make beachballing less likely, especially as it won’t be necessary anymore to create one giant database.

Thanks, Christian for the reply and the reassuring news. Would love to cut down on the number of apps and to do my draft-writing in DT. Did I mention that some sturdier outlining-features would help as well? Looking forward to the next generation of DT, keep up the good work.

kithairon

I’d like to second kithairon’s post about using DT for writing, and add another request:

better formatting features.

The current format menu is not very user-friendly and structured somewhat counter-intuitively. The “Styles” menu is confusing, since it is not possible to add new styles. Also, the order seems arbitrary. For instance, alignment is the third entry, after Fonts and Styles, but Spacing is the seventh entry, after Highlight. Now, fonts, typeface, and highlights are all attributes of a character, but spacing and alignment are attributes of paragraphs. It would make more sense to keep all the character attributes together and the paragraph attributes together.

Also, it would be nice if there was some GUI for formatting. Something like a formatting palette (perhaps one that could be disabled, so if people don’t want it, they can get rid of it). Such a palette could include graphic icons, making formatting more intuitive.

(Incidentally, for my work, these are pretty basic features, and I need them, even though I do most of my writing in different applications and only use DTP as a database to structure ideas and material).