It has acquired new ways to access options, such as an instant hierarchic tree selector for switching languages: almost without breaking typing speed, everything including mnemonic keyboards can be switched in mid line if required. Nota Bene itself, the frames-based word processor which unifies the whole, is specifically designed to take advantage of these information base capabilities and is explicitly oriented towards academic writing. If extended multilingual support is not important to you, the alternative is Scholar’s Workstation. This review used the Lingua Workstation variant, with particular attention to mixed, Greek and Ukrainian handling plus a little Hebrew. The result is a flexible ‘mixed economy’ data environment combining the most appropriate typing for different purposes.Īn optional add on, Archiva, integrates with Ibidem to become an automatic reference harvester feeding the data bases from online libraries and articles – depending on the version you choose, it may also capture and save textual information from web pages, convert ISBNs into full bibliographic data, and reverse engineer existing bibliographies into sets of Ibidem records.Īlso optional, the Lingua extension provides the best multilingual facilities of any currently available word processor. A small realignment away from internal traditions promises a large payoff in potential development of the tools and platform, which in turn assures a healthy evolutionary path.Īlongside Orbis is Ibidem, whose first layer of purpose is to manage bibliographic information, but beneath which lies a general purpose engine that (in the guise of Ibid Plus) can be used to manage any structured flat file database. At the same time, a lot of work has been done on providing the bases for future updates and extensions as well. Although the program installs with a full complement of bells and whistles, which might be confusing for newcomers, everything is customisable to suit individual working space preferences – right down to a sparse, bare-bones minimum if required. That interface upgrade is evident throughout the whole suite though it was always smooth and intuitive, it is now noticeably richer with options and alternatives thata together constitute an impressive gradient in productivity potential. Text analysts will particularly like the vocabulary and search stack, retrieval links display, ability to flick back and forth between textbase and wider system, and the graphic search map. The Orbis interface now comprises dockable floating task panes, from entry through query, search, retrieval and source to history, with those not always needed sliding out from tabs as required. The most immediately obvious developments this time around are in Orbis, which has been completely revamped. Creation of a textbase is a straightforward matter of choosing a root directory and file types, then letting Orbis run chosen files are indexed down the file system from there, and will be maintained on the fly thereafter as new material is added. Its concept-based synonym searching also makes it a useful exploratory and preparatory text analysis tool.Ĭentral to the platform, from that perspective, is Orbis which provides automatic indexed free form hypertext database searching of any material (notes, book length texts, field and lab reports, data sets) which has been written in or imported to NB. Nota Bene (NB), generally thought of as a word processor, is actually a remarkably complete academic information management environment, with a word processor as its face. This review is made on the basis of several months’ experience with late public beta versions of release 10, which have proved solid enough, although some components of the final feature set are not yet in place.
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