Readers of TidBITS know of my unabashed obsession with the storage and retrieval of information, especially the free-form textual information an academic must track and manipulate in order to write lectures, books, and articles. So when a new piece of software, Palimpsest, turned out to be created especially for people like me, it didn't take Nostradamus to predict I'd be intrigued. And when Palimpsest turned out to combine word-processing elements with features of cool tools like HyperCard, Storyspace (see TidBITS-095), Conc, and FreeText - and written, to top it all off, using Prograph (see TidBITS-312) - I was downright interested.
<www.umich.edu/~archive/mac/hypercard/ organization/freetext1.03.cpt.hqx>
Palimpsest comes from Western Civilisation, an Australian company. It started as a private way of managing thousands of pages of legal documents; now it's released to the world for managing, investigating, and relating electronic documents generally. (A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been rubbed out and written over, and no, I didn't have to look it up; I used to be a classicist, remember?) You can learn more about Palimpsest at their Web site, or download a demo from Info-Mac.
<www.westciv.com.au/>
<ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/text/>
The Basic Milieu -- You use Palimpsest to read, create, navigate, and investigate Palimpsest documents. If your documents aren't initially Palimpsest documents, you can create a Palimpsest document and either paste (or drag & drop) material into it, or import material as styled text from SimpleText.
Using Palimpsest looks and feels rather like using HyperCard. You probably will have several windows that look like HyperCard stacks, each consisting of one card dominated by a scrolling field of styled, editable text. Each "stack" is actually called a Section, and Sections are bound together behind the scenes into a Document. Each Section can itself be subdivided by Headings. Here's how Documents, Sections, and Headings are related:
A Heading is merely a piece of text to which you have applied the Make Heading command. Using a floating windoid called the Heading Browser (which displays the Headings in whatever Section is frontmost) you can give each Heading a level, so that they appear in a hierarchical, outline-like relationship to one another. (This hierarchy is purely conceptual; it has no visible analogue within the text of the Section itself.) Double-clicking a heading in the Heading Browser jumps you to that place in the Section.
Similarly, a Table of Contents window lists the Sections of the Document in a meaningful order, like chapters in a book. You can change the order by dragging the Section listings, and each Section listing can expand to show the Headings it contains. Again, you can double-click a Section or Heading listing in the Table of Contents to go there.
You can also navigate from Section to Section conveniently with a pop-up menu in the lower left corner of each Section window, which lists all Sections of the Document.
Section Types and Document Types -- Sections come in Types, which are like HyperCard backgrounds: for instance, if a typical Section of a particular Document is of the "Chapter" type, then the physical layout of each Chapter Section is identical, differing only in the contents of its fields. Documents come in Types too, each consisting of the Section types it can contain. At any time, you can alter a Document by adding a new Section of any type which that type of Document can contain.
There are also automatic Section types: the Table of Contents is itself a Section type, but you can't create a new one; every document automatically contains exactly one Table of Contents, as well as one Title Page and one Cover. You can, however, modify these Sections - for instance, you can paste a picture on the Cover.
A Document Type and the Section Types that constitute it form a template instantly affecting all Documents of that type. You can modify an existing Document type, or create a new Document type. To do so, you draw the layout of its Section types, possibly by modifying existing Section types to make the process faster. You can change the size of a Section's window (its "card" size); you can add or resize Section fields (like "card fields", their contents are unique to each Section) or Document fields (like "background fields", their contents are shared among all Sections in which they appear). You can also give a field a name, a style (e.g. scrolling or not), an initial text, initial text-style attributes, and so on. All this can be done intuitively, as in HyperCard or FileMaker.
Slicing the Cake -- What I've described thus far is a convenient method of dividing, formatting, and navigating a document, but it isn't all that different from what you might do with a word processor. The interesting part comes when you start to slice through the Document's divisions, to examine and navigate your Document in new ways.
For example, you might do a Search on a particular word or set of words you're interested in. The results appear as a new window showing every matching occurrence, one per line, each with some context around it - in effect, a customized concordance to a Document. If you double-click a line of context, you jump to that spot in the actual Document.
You might also create a hypertext link between two places in a Document. Such links are documented in a Cross-Reference Details window, showing you all links emanating from the selected text, and letting you specify a comment, an author, and a label for each link. So, you're not only linking to another location but annotating and categorizing the link as well. Later, having selected some linked passage, you can either follow the link or open the Detai