After a search for appropriate programs, the suite for this particular task included:
• PersonalBrain 2.1,
• MS Word 2002 with SP-1,
• Fine Print pdfFactory v1.26,
• Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5.
Selection of these programs came about through needing to integrate Brainstorming, Mind Mapping, Document Idea Generation, Document Writing, Document Formatting, Document Conversion and Document Presentation.
This was perhaps the most difficult program to locate in the whole suite; the other programs are found on most everyone’s computers. However, this was the key to achieving many of the efficiencies in this system. The outstanding concept embedded with PersonalBrain is the way brainstorming and idea generation can be achieved with links to anything within one’s computer, websites across the internet and all linked to ideas within personal texts. Essentially the way PersonalBrain is used here is to provide a methodology for databasing chunks of text for use and re-use in later texts.
Basic Units: The Thought
The most basic unit of information used in PersonalBrain is the ‘thought’. A thought can be entered into PersonalBrain and then linked with any other thought. Ideas can be generated and linked in an appropriate logical manner for the idea generation stage. However, any thought can be forgotten, deleted, or re-linked with other thoughts. A thought can also be linked with a templated text carrier, such as MS Word, so that a thought can be expanded into text. Thoughts can be relocated by following a thought’s logical connections, or through entering text in a search facility; text can be located by following the logic of thought connection and/or by using a search facility to search all text.
The magic of PersonalBrain is the way the ‘plex’ displays connections between thoughts. Mind Mapping and Brainstorm diagrams can get very cluttered and messy. PersonalBrain thoughts are constructed in such a way that immediate connections are available and viewable, whereas more distant thoughts are not within the viewing area (plex). Thus, even though there maybe 20,000 thoughts within the particular Brain, only a handful are shown and only that handful need to be shown to identify where in the thought process this current thought is placed.
Flexibility of PersonalBrain
PersonalBrain is so well structured that it provides both flexibility for Brainstorming and Idea Generation and also allows the composer to re-structure thoughts into a chapter and section organization after the thoughts have been generated. In fact the original idea generation structure, which tends to be more thematic, does not have to be erased at all. Rather, chapter and section organization can be superimposed over the thematic version and both can be followed after the more structured version is entered.
Through using PersonalBrain, the computer is able to complete the text of an entire book without having to place each text component into a document structure until almost the very last moment. What this gives is a much neater document structure in MS Word, as well as making the final structuring of the book the final act, and thus allowing the composer to be very much more flexible in drafting ideas for the book without being constricted by the structure of the book’s presentation until the last moment.
Discovering New Texts
In addition, by having all text in thematic chunks, these chunks can be used and re-used in other settings far more easily than in other formats. By having the total text of a single author captured as text chunks, the largest of which is a single section, including diagrams, tables and other objects that are needed for that thematic chunk, it is possible to combine and re-combine these chunks into other texts. One of the author’s favorite activities is to search using a particular keyword, linking the thoughts together, and then forming a MS Word document using these associated chunks to then realize a text not planned to be a text by the author. This is both instructive to the author about conclusions that can be drawn from a cross referencing of material, and provides new ways of viewing the information for sales as ebooks that otherwise may have never been written.
However, what was needed was flexibility of using the word processor to store the text chunks, and also to also pull together these chunks into larger texts, such as chapters and then finally, a full text. The most versatile program to achieve this is MS Word. MS Word uses two formats for texts, the smaller and more compact Rich Text Files (.rtf) and the larger and more extensive Document Format (.doc) which can be used to build extensive texts, such as ‘hundreds of pages’ ebook-texts.
File handling capabilities built into a MS Word Document, using file insertion techniques and automatically updating fields, provides a very flexible way of combining text chunks into a larger document. In fact fields can be inserted into a series of documents to build text chunks into larger documents, such as a chapter document, and then combining chapter documents into book documents. This makes it possible for future documents to take an entire chapter from a current book and have the entire chapter inserted into that next book.
eBookIn addition, MS Word has a feature that provides the composer with even greater flexibility in re-organizing a book at larger levels than text chunks. The logic of an ebook may be reformed at the chunk level, section level, and chapter level in MS Word using the Outliner that is built into this program.
There are also a number of conversion programs that provides a composer with conversion from .doc format to .pdf format. These include programs distributed by Adobe as well as third party programmers. Each of these conversion programs written for MS Word has their own specialty in converting different types of programs. This range of conversion programs is not available for other word processors and book publishing programs.
This program is a printer driver that is added to MS Word to convert a .doc from MS Word Document Format to Adobe Acrobat Reader Format. While there are other conversion drivers, even those provided by Adobe for use with MS Word, this third party driver convert the .rtf formatted documents most efficiently. The pdfFactory is an inexpensive program that can be used as a free program for the first 30 days while tested on your computer.
The most important factor in selecting Fine Print is the speed of conversion, as well as ensuring all formatting and links are converted to the Adobe Acrobat Format.Adobe Acrobat format .pdf (Personal Document Format) is so easy to use and so accessible for most people that issuing an ebook in most any other format is not a consideration. For this suite, it is not necessary to have Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5, in that really all that is needed is that a file be constructed by Fine Print and used by Adobe Acrobat Reader.
However, there are a number of additional features that can be added to a .pdf document if you do have Acrobat itself. There are options that can be added to the format to restrict printing, copying and other duplication. As well, there are other signature and encryption options that can be used to protect the final documents.