Re: Future of Knowit

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 1:33 AM, Michal Rudolf <mrudolf-W20+MoKGEJdEHWO/[email protected]> wrote:
> I will probably have some free time in the near future. Please tell me what do
> you think: should Knowit be continued?

I would very much like to see KnowIt continued. Here are my major reasons:

1. Editing in either rich text or raw text mode atop (I assume) the
KHTML rendering engine. Unsupported HTML markup, e..g., inline
hyperlinks and blockquoting, can be used and still renders correctly
in Rich Text mode and exports nicely to HTML.

2. Minimalistic HTML export that produces source code that is great
for use in other apps. E.g., copy and paste to Google Docs, Zoho
Writer, Drupal, and a host of other web apps that allow direct editing
of content in an HTML form. Open directly in OOWriter and from there
save or export to a host of other formats.  This kind of capability
makes it feasible to takes notes in NoteCase and massage them into a
publishable document or move the notes to another app with more
powerful editing features.

3. Automagic hyperlinked table of contents generation on export to
HTML. That makes KnowIt very valuable because many web apps do not
have such support. Among those that do, even fewer have timed
auto-backup, making it risky to create content directly in them.

The only other outliners running on Linux I've found with a similar
table of contents capability are NoteCase and NoteCase Pro. Former is
BSD-licensed with its development all but frozen; latter is under
active development but is proprietary. Both are incapable of indenting
content. E.g., lists and subsequent lines in list items, tabulations,
left and right indents, etc.

Basket exports to HTML with a hyperlinked table of contents (no HTML
export options) but its export is so gussied up with CSS and icon
images that it is non-useful for working with the mix of applications
mentioned above. Basket also hits me as singularly unattractive; IMHO
there's far more developer gadgetry than sensitivity to real-world
user requirements there. A lot of sizzle but not much steak.

Despite a fair amount of bugs, KnowIt is a truly useful app for those
who understand HTML markup. It would be useful to far more people if
the bugs were fixed and a few more enhancements were added. I've got
extensive notes on each of those categories if there's interest.

I don't know if you are still contemplating rebuilding from the ground
up using Qt4, Michal. If so, you might check out what the development
road map is at KDE in regard to KHTML. I've read some reports
speculating that KDE will be moving to WebKit instead. WebKit is a
fork of KHTML that seems to be the coming thing for non-Microsoft web
browser development. See e.g., <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webkit>.

Major enhancements I'd suggest, in roughly my personal order of
priority (I can go into more detail if desired):

1. Ability to merge outlines and to cut, copy and paste nodes and
subtrees from one outline to another. Having to perform such
operations in a text editor directly in a .KNO is a major PITA.

2. Footnote and endnote capability with automagic numbering and
ordering. There is a major hole in the market for folks who need to
generate footnotes or endnotes in outlined HTML documents. This is,
generally speaking, the same crowd who want a hyperlinked table of
contents. Academics, students, folks in business and government who
have to generate reports, law office workers, etc.

As best I can determine the only outliners on the market that have
such support are full-blown word processors that for the most part are
incapable of generating minimalistic HTML that can be used in most web
apps that allow direct editing of HTML in a form.

3. Context-sensitive autotext abbreviation expansion/word completion.
On the Rich Text side, the autotext can produce Rich Text. On the Raw
Text side, it switches to a Quanta-Plus like insertion of HTML,
landing the cursor between generated HTML tags or directly after
markup entities.

4. Prettify the HTML markup with line endings, blank lines, and
indents so the marked up source is easier to read. Syntax highlighting
would be a big plus.

5. Special character support. Much of this if not all could be handled
through abbreviation expansion. E.g., "sss" to get a legal section
sign, "ssss" to get two of them, "umlaut" to get an umlaut, automatic
expansion of two hyphens to an en dash, three hyphens to an em dash,
ampersand to an escaped ampersand, etc.

But different abbreviation/expansion lexicons should be selectable,
editable, and easily exportable to share  with other users.

6. Node tagging would be very nice, along with some features to take
advantage of node tags. E.g., optional automagic creation of a Related
Topics section at the end of each node that shares one or more tags
with that node, with hyperlinks for each using the related node topics
as the hyperlink titles.

You have some excellent and highly useful concepts in KnowIt and have
an obvious flair for UI design. Continuation of KnowIt:

+1

Best regards,

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. (Marbux)

P.S. NoteCase Pro now has much improved .KNO import filters. It's
available as a free download with the only crippled feature being the
document save features. Packages are available for several different
Linux distros. <http://www.virtual-sky.com/download.php>. If you do
decide to discontinue KnowIt, a list on the web site of outliners able
to import .KNO documents would be an aid to KnowIt users.

-- 
Universal Interoperability Council
<http:www.universal-interop-council.org>

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