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Old 06-11-2021, 10:12 AM
Spliff Spliff is online now
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Join Date: 04-07-2021
Posts: 72
From internal text links (available now) to exportable text links

I always thought that MyInfo (an UR "competitor", but which in my trials, even with just some items for trial, invariably crashed; not speaking here of their brand-new version 6 though) was the only "outliner" offering text links, i.e. not only linking from some item to another, but from within a paragraph or other text position" to some other position within the database (to be honest to the "competitor", that other position within the database would then be, I think, in MyInfo, another text position indeed - linking from paragraph to paragraph -, whilst for UR, the "in-content" cursor position (with or without having made a selection beforehand) would be linked to another item, not to another text position within another item, if I'm not mistaken).

In UR, I just discovered this functionality by accident, the linking function "Tree - Link/Move To", for items when the tree is focused, remaining denominated the same, in the menu, when - here by my inadvertency - it's called from within the content pane, but then the appearing dialogue is renamed, from "Link/Move/Copy Item To", to "Insert Internal Link To Item".

I don't have any current use case for such functionality, but would have had in the past, and a non-considerable amount of users of "outliners" like UR et al. will have indeed a need for such functionality, but, I think, especially from paragraph to paragraph, and then, EXPORTABLE to "printed", book publication, in some way; since no "outliner" of my knowledge (MyInfo included) does this, concerned users continue to use MS Word (or perhaps WordPerfect or other traditional "text processing" application).

I know this is quite complicated a task, since it also implies a) identification of the paragraphs beyond multiple items (within a sub-tree = "book project" or similar), and b) subsequent maintenance of this internal paragraph identification (i.e. NOT necessarily also updating of numbering, since the final numbering then could be a sub-routine in the export routine only).

But fact is, exportable linking from paragraph to paragraph (which then, AFTER export, by the target application (InDesign? QuarkXPress?), could be "resolved" into page numbers of the target publication if need is and the paragraph numbers should not be maintained, as they are though in some legal publications) is a feature which is in high demand in academia and in the publishing world, and UR could do it (via its XML export) in order to get substantially more followers, all the more so since specialized software in that field is in the 4-digit pricing range currently.

(As said, I don't need this functionality personally anymore - did it manually when I needed it -, but such a functionality seems to be possible to be implemented with just some additionally coding, and then could bring lots of new users, except perhaps for users also needing formulas in their writings, but even that could probably (?) be made possible by using MS Word as an external editor for those "pages"?)
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