Thanks, Alexandria. As much as I admire Mellel’s wonderful outlining function, I think I can get the same effect via Devon. For me, the big conceptual leap was realizing that a “note” in Devon can be anything – a “section” as in CopyWrite, a “file,” a “chapter” – whatever you want to call it. We have this visual metaphor of each note as a piece of paper inside a folder, but it’s really just a bit of info, and Devon is powerful enough to let you organize or conceptualize it in different ways – as notecards in the info gathering phase, as sections or outline points in the organizing phase, and as docs in the formatting phase. So, it’s a notetaking program today, an outlining program tomorrow, even a basic writing program next month. Maybe specialized apps like Notebook make each phase a bit easier, but I’m finding that for my purposes, Devon can handle almost everything, and I like dealing with only one app.
That’s what makes Devon so useful to me – its flexibility. I write my articles and columns in Devon and export to Word (actually TextEdit saved in Word format) only because that’s what the production folks are used to; Devon’s formatting is sufficient for those simple articles that require no footnoting and little formatting. I’ve also been happily surprised to find Devon useful for organizing and drafting a historically based theater project that also has a whole bunch of historical info that needs assimilating.
In a perfect world, for simplicity’s sake, I’d ONLY use Devon, or maybe Devon and TextEdit, and that’s actually what I do already for 90% of my work. I do agree with one of the posters here that we don’t want to overload or bloat Devon with too many WP features.
When I get back on the book in a couple weeks, I’ll try to keep drafting in Devon, but am considering moving the final writing to mellel instead of Word if my coauthor agrees; Word’s reviewing function is, I must admit, useful in collaborative projects.
But I’ll check Mellel’s forum again as you suggest. Its footnote limitations aren’t a big deal to me; at this point, we’re thinking that the footnotes will be at the end of the whole book, not each chapter, but that could change depending on what the publisher wants. If I didn’t already have Word, I’d certainly buy Mellel, as it seems to offer much more than other WPs (or office suites like appleworks and neoOffice) and to be easier to use. I do wish it’d save files in rtf format, but I see from the forum that the developers have considered and rejected that options for no doubt good reasons. I’m just leery of getting locked into a proprietary format, though I realize you can export to rtf after everything’s done.
There’s probably no holy grail for big writing projects, as much as we’d all like to find one. Devon, so far, comes closest for me.
brett
PS I PMed you a while back to tell you that I live down the road (or up the river) apiece in Eugene, though I visit Portland often.