3. KWord
KWord is a fine frame oriented word processor. Everything goes in a frame. This gives it great power in applications such as newsletters, where you may have a number of items each in its own area, and some text has to flow around some items. It is great for cases where graphic objects and text are interspersed. It does all the usual word processing things in addition - footnotes, formatting. What it is not, is a good outliner. In fact, if you compare it with Kate, what it adds, in terms of document structure, apart from footnotes, is mainly the page layout capability. It is very light on document management features, but very high on page layout features. If you compare it with Leo, Leo has none of its interesting features. If you compare it with Lyx, Lyx does many of the same page layout functions, but the difference is in customization. KWord is easily customisable by anyone, Lyx not at all by most. KWord does support a document structure pane, which is very similar to Kate's, but this isn't really an outliner. KWord also exports and imports in rtf and doc formats.
The main issue with KWord, for our purposes, is that when a package is totally frame oriented, you cannot get away from page layout while composing. This is one of the disadvantages of traditional word processors, and its a disadvantage which is accentuated by KWord. You can open up a word processor and just start writing a long book. It would be unwise to do this in KWord without clearly understanding the implications of writing in a frame.
4. OpenOffice
To do outlining and document structuring in OO, one opens the Navigator and the Stylist in the Word Processing application. By double clicking on a style, the line item on which the cursor sits in the body of the text is given that style. The Navigator, if configured in the right mode, will then show a heirarchical structure of headings, and if placed into the right sub-mode will permit manipulation, ie moving around of sections. There are the usual styles, footnotes are handled well, and there are just about all the standard word processing features. One can also set up a Master document, a function whose use has eluded my ability to teach.
To use these features is to appreciate the ease of use of the Lyx interface for doing the same thing. The default OO headings do not structure the document in an intuitively heirarchical way. The Lyx structure looks the part - as it should, since it is almost impossible to change! OO does not. Headings two and three are not obviously subordinate one to the other. As you do it in OO, you realise you are caught between laying out the document as it will appear when printed, and laying out the logical structure of the document. Users are tempted to use headings as an indication of how they want the document to appear. There is no reason not to. Thus, don't like the way that heading two looks? Just start the headings at heading three. Or heading four. Why not? In Lyx, you will be forced to use the headings in their logical sense, because at the composition stage, you basically are not controlling at all how the document will look when printed. You are just classifying its parts and getting the content down. In addition, the floating panes occupy space on screen. You cannot deploy them in a separate desktop because as soon as you use them, they merge all panes back into one desktop. For some reason the drop down menu on the left only shows you choices you have previously made from the Stylist. None of this is fatal, but it makes an impression of great clunkiness, and it gets in the way of, rather than assists, writing content in a clear structure.
5. Treeline and Other Jots/Notes Packages
There are a great many of these, and in increasing order of functionality, one can list: Kjots, Gjots, Tuxcards, TreePad for Linux, Treeline. The first three are attractively simple, probably too simple for this purpose, but I looked in detail at Treeline, which is an interesting and powerful package, though with quite a steep learning curve. As with Leo, if you go for this, you need to be aware that you're recommending your author use a tool only partially in accordance with its intended purpose.
When you start Treeline, the first thing you need to do is set up your file for writing. The default mode comes with a one line deep editor, and no fields defined except for the name field. If you want to write documents, you'll need to set up a heading field, a text field, and make all of the extra nodes you create contain these fields. It is not very intuitive, but it only has to be done once. The fields can be of a number of types, including images.
