Dunno if it’ll be useful to you, but here’s what I’ve been doing lately. I use DN as a note viewer, a document outliner AND a word processor – simultaneously. Basically, I can make DN work like CopyWrite (which I’ve demoed in the past), but with much more flexibility.
I open two DN browsers, side by side. The browser on the left displays all the notes in the project folder. So, if I’m writing an article about a subject, I title the folder whatever the subject name is, and then each note (taken from the web, emails, original notes I typed in myself, etc) has its own title. I set DN to view this left hand browser in “horizontal split” mode, showing three or four notes at the top, and the text of the selected note at the bottom. So the left hand browser allows me to quickly navigate among my notes and see the text of whatever note I’m working from at the moment.
The right hand browser contains the actual text I’m writing, along with an outline of that text (a la CopyWrite or Mellel or ZWrite). I do that by setting the right hand browser view to vertical split, with the left side of the (right hand) browser displaying each outline point (that is, each note is an outline point or section of the document), and the right side displaying the text of that note/outline point/section (whatever you want to call it). So I can quickly navigate through a long document using the left hand side of the right hand browser.
This would be a lot easier to see in a screen shot, but essentially I divide the screen into 3 parts: from left to right there’s a note viewer on the left side (taking up about a quarter of the screen), the document outline in the middle (taking up about an eighth of the screen), and the document text on the right taking up most of the screen space. Obviously this works better on my external 17" display than on my 12" Powerbook screen.
When I’m done writing all the sections, I merge all the sections (using the merge command), do any final edits on that merged document in full screen mode, then export the whole finished document as an rtf. That way I have a copy of the finished article in DN (the merged version) and in my articles folder (the rtf version).
Sorry it took so long to explain this method; it probably sounds clunky and convoluted as presented here, and maybe Devon could offer the option of a sidebar outline to simplify it a bit, but it’s actually pretty straightforward and quick after you’ve done it once. DN gives me all the formatting and other word processor controls I need, and a live word count (very helpful in my work) that most word processors lack. And this arrangement allows me to see simultaneously an overview of my whole document, the text I’m writing, and the notes I’m writing the article from.
Hope this is useful to someone.