User:Mary Lord Bernard/Nota Bene (word processor)

Nota Bene is both a Windows word processor and a seamlessly integrated suite of applications for scholars and writers. The platform includes Ibidem (a bibliographic management tool), and Orbis (a text-oriented search database). Many users employ the suite as a research platform with a built-in word processor.

Nota Bene comes in two major versions: Scholar's Workstation, and Lingua Workstation.

The principal components of the Scholar's Workstation are:

• Nota Bene, the word-processing application
• Ibidem, the citation and bibliography manager, which includes Ibidem Plus, a highly customisable non-bibliographic database; and, optionally, Archiva, a web-research module which captures bibliographic data and full text from major on-line news publications
• Orbis, a sophisticated text retrieval application.

The Lingua Workstation has all of the above, plus integrated non-Western languages and alphabets, including Hebrew, Cyrillic and Greek, along with the International Phonetic Alphabet, and optional add-ons for Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Coptic, Syriac, Ugaritic and Akkadian. This non-Western language support is why the program has such a wide following among Biblical scholars.

History

Nota Bene (NB) began as a DOS program in 1982, built on the engine of the word processor XyWrite. Nota Bene's creator, Steve Siebert, was a doctoral student in philosophy and religious studies at Yale. Using a PC to take reading notes, he ended up with "hundreds of pages of totally unstructured notes, with all sorts of provocative quotations...along with arguments in various stages of development"—but no easy computer-based mechanism for searching through them, or, more important, for finding relationships and connections in the material he had amassed.

His frustration led him to conceive of Orbis, a program that would automate finding text that he knew he had, and reveal relationships and stimulate creativity by presenting new connections among the data. He also wanted a bibliographical database that would automate the process of entering repeat citations correctly, and in different academic styles, suitable for different documents or submission to publishers with different style-manual requirements.

Siebert and XyWrite developer Dave Erickson became friends, and Steve ended up licensing the XyWrite code from Erickson's company, XyQuest. He used it to develop Nota Bene, along with Orbis (then called Textbase) and Ibidem (then called Ibid); and founded Dragonfly Software to market it. He first showed Nota Bene at the MLA convention of December 1982.

NB caught on rapidly in the academic community; a number of current users started with versions 1 or 2 between 1983 and 1986. Version 3.0 came out in 1988, and version 4.0 in 1992. Version 4.5, a major update, came out in 1995. It was the last NB DOS version.

Nota Bene 5.0 for Windows was first shown, in a prerelease version, at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature in November 1998. Scholar's Workstation version 5.0 was formally released in 1999, and the Lingua Workstation in 2000. The new Nota Bene suite retained and greatly refined Ibidem and Orbis, and became a fully Windows program without sacrificing the customisability that has always been a large part of its appeal for many users.

Version 6.0 appeared in 2002, version 7.0 in 2003, version 8.0 in 2006 and version 9.0 announced May 20, 2010.

The word processor

Nota Bene's word processor is known for speed, not looks. Its Orbis and Ibidem components are attractive, but the interface of the main word processor shows its age. The toolbars and buttons cannot be customised, and the program cannot be skinned.

The simple, text-oriented screen has its merits, however, for Nota Bene's primary clientele: academics in the humanities and social sciences, writers and lawyers. Fast, elegant and highly configurable, the program shines at text creation and editing, especially of books and articles that depend on scholarly resources and research. In addition to predefined academic styles (e.g., Chicago Manual of Style, Modern Language Association, Turabian, American Psychological Association) it provides customising options and the capacity to change entire documents, with their scholarly apparatus, from one style to another effortlessly.

Features common to contemporary word processors, such as templates, spell-checking, and change-tracking, are included; also integrated is a sophisticated system for generating indexes, tables of contents and cross-references. Features not commonly found in other word processors include "phrase libraries" for inserting boilerplate with a simple key combination or through a menu; users can have, and easily load, an unlimited number of such libraries.

The word processor also includes a structured outlining format, hyperlinking, three independent sets of footnotes/endnotes, dynamic bi-directional cross-referencing, and book-length manuscript editing. Documents can be imported from and exported into most major word-processing programs. Up to 36 files can be open at once in the same NB window. All open documents can be simultaneously saved with one keystroke. The positions and views of all open files can be logged at program shutdown, then re-opened exactly as they were, even returning to the cursor position in each; and multiple groups of files can be saved for work on different projects.

The keyboard

Nota Bene comes equipped with a large number of built-in keyboard shortcuts, The keyboard logic is designed around manipulation of word, sentence and paragraph: the user can highlight, transpose, delete, and move through text with simple keystrokes; or simultaneously scroll the text in two documents. Most commands can be entered in several ways: through menus, toolbars, command line, or keystroke combinations, or by mouse.

Many users simply use the built-in shortcuts, but they can, if they wish, move or customise most of them. The program's keyboard tables allow user modification of virtually all alphanumeric and function keys, using the Ctrl, Alt, and Shift modifiers in all possible combinations: over 450 key combinations.

Codes view and XPL programming

Nota Bene includes both a fully editable Show Codes view, and the programming language XPL, in which users can write simple macros or complex programs. They can also download programs written by other users, or a large library of XPL programs compatible with both NB and Xywrite. The latest version of the customisation manual is available on the NB website.

The user list

Nota Bene has a friendly, erudite and discursive user support group. It has existed since 1986, and was among the earliest of such groups.

Strengths

The strengths of the Nota Bene word processor are speed, flexibility, customisability, and seamless integration with the Ibidem bibliographic database and Orbis textbase, using a common interface. In addition, the Help files for all components of the suite are thorough, comprehensible and well-written.

Limitations

Nota Bene is an academic suite, not an office suite. It handles graphics and cellular tables, but less transparently than Microsoft Word. NB is not well suited to collaborative projects, since it has no group-editing utility. But NB documents can readily be converted into and out of Word and other formats. Finally, though the code is partly 32 bit, it still contains 16-bit elements, so the program must be run in 32-bit Windows, or in a virtual machine in 64-bit Windows.

Orbis

Nota Bene calls Orbis a textbase. It is a free-form text-retrieval system accessible from within Nota Bene. Its purpose is to retrieve information from any text the user has written (or imported from other programs), using simple or complex Boolean searches. The retrieved information can be viewed, saved, or easily inserted into existing or new documents.

Orbis is extremely fast. There are no practical limits to the amount of information that can be handled: over 8 million files can be searched simultaneously. Orbis instantly shows a table view of every passage that contains the given word or combination of words, and the full text with keywords highlighted in another panel. A single keystroke inserts chosen passages into an open document. If the retrieved text is linked to a bibliographic record in the user's Ibidem database, Orbis can automatically insert the correct citation into the document or open the record for additional inquiry.

Orbis's synonym feature enables concept-based searches, as well as searches restricted to exact matches of words in the indexed data. For instance, searching for "authoritarian" finds all passages in the textbase that contain this word. But if the user has associated "authoritarian" with such terms as "caudillo", "strongman" and "dictatorship" in a synonym list, Orbis will also find all passages containing those words.

Files for Orbis indexing need not contain any special words or symbols. Users can keep all their research notes in free form in files simply named "Notes1.nb", "Notes2.nte" or even "1", "2", "3", "4", and so forth. (Unlike most word-processing programs, Nota Bene does not limit filename extensions or even require them.) Orbis databases can update automatically, incorporating changes to existing files and adding new files that meet user specifications (e.g., "*.nte").

Orbis affords instant access to the thousands of pages of text a user may have accumulated: research notes, lectures, jottings, lab reports, interview transcripts, field notes, lists, paragraphs from previous papers, chapters of books, or whole books. It makes research-based writing much easier, by enabling users to make new connections within new or existing data and come up with new ideas. Relationships among terms and frequencies of those relations are plotted for each search, thereby encouraging additional questions.

Orbis has dedicated templates for interviews, and for searching English, Greek and Hebrew Biblical texts. It can be used to analyse congressional or parliamentary debates, and lawyers use it to scrutinise case law. Non-academic writers, even writers of fiction, can find it useful—for instance, to keep track of how often they have used a particular phrase.

Ibidem

Ibidem is the bibliographic management database integrated into the Nota Bene suite. It is equipped with the citation and bibliographic rules of over 500 journals and professional associations. Bibliographical information for a book or journal need only be entered once. After choosing an academic style for a document, users enter citations with one click. The entries are automatically formatted (as footnotes, endnotes, or in-text citation) according to the requirements of the chosen style, as are subsequent references to the same work, and bibliographies.

An Ibidem record can be cited in different styles in many different documents; if a publisher requires a different citation style, all citations and bibliography can be instantly changed to the new style.

Ibidem and Orbis can be hypertextually interlinked to each other and to NB or non-NB documents. After entering a bibliographic record into Ibidem, a user can take notes in a file linked to the record, use Orbis to search for terms, and enter material into a document with the inserted bibliographical information automatically formatted to suit the rules of the academic style being used. This saves time, and eliminates the risk of entering unintentional variants through typing errors.

Lingua

NB's Lingua Workstation is in most respects identical to the Scholar's Workstation, except that the word-processor, Orbis and Ibidem provide a full range of functionality in non-Western languages and alphabets such as Hebrew, Cyrillic and Greek, as well as the International Phonetic Alphabet, and NB's optional modules for Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Syriac, and Coptic.

Users can mix languages and orientation (left-to-right and right-to-left) in the same document or even on the same line; words wrap properly from line to line. Lingua positions vowels and accents much more accurately than MS Word, automatically takes into account the height or width of a character in placing a vowel or accent, and automatically selects the correct form for letters that vary depending on their position in a word (e.g., the Greek sigma).

Over 1,700 distinct characters can be entered. Over 230 distinct accents, breathing marks, vowels and cantillations can be added to any character, in virtually any combination, using simple key combinations or dialogs; and as many diacritics as needed can be stacked above or below any character. Lingua also has sophisticated auto-positioning when vowels and cantillations are combined. Furtive patahs are handled automatically, and users can control the positioning of doubled post- and pre-positives. Lingua supports conjectural characters, three levels of superscript and subscript, multilingual case conversion and multilingual entry; as well as sorting and searching in Orbis, Ibidem, and NB Lingua itself.

For printing, Lingua's sophisticated font-rendering table enables more accurate placement of marks than do many dedicated typesetting systems.

Extra modules

Archiva

Archiva is an always-on Web trawler. It checks all material that users copy while on line, and automatically converts any bibliographical data to Ibidem format and places them in a "Captured Records" database. With Archiva, Nota Bene users can search more than 500 university, research and public libraries—including multi-library collections such as COPAC, which incorporates the merged online catalogues of over 50 major university and national libraries in the UK and Ireland, including the British Library. If pertinent information is missing, Archiva can automatically search the Library of Congress to fill in the blanks. Its ISBN converter can use scanned or typed ISBN numbers to configure them as Ibidem records. Archiva's Web-page-capture module allows users to collect information from any Web page and turn it into records without typing or pasting.

Biblical texts

Five versions of Biblical texts are available for Lingua: the Hebrew Bible (Vocalized Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, UBS); the Greek New Testament (UBS, 4th edition); the Septuagint (Rahlfs); the Vulgate (UBS); and the King James Version.

Tabula

Nota Bene's Tabula is a Biblical concordance-building program, which retrieves texts from up to five Biblical texts in parallel columns.