I’ve blogged about the Zim Desktop Wiki before. It has some really nice features, things like hyperlinking to other pages in my work, hyperlinking to other sources (either on my computer or the internet), checkboxes to help keep track what’s completed and what’s not, and a spell checker. What I’ve had trouble with, is organizing. I haven’t been able to make the outline in my head a reality in the index pane on the left. I’ve looked at the documentation, but it’s pretty slim in the explanation department. Tutorials on the web seem nonexistent, and YouTube videos show more about what it can do than how to do it.
In a huge “duh” moment, I finally realized that Zim’s index categorizes everything alphabetically. For some projects this would be useful, but for an outline, not so much. especially if there are a lot of points on that outline and therefore a lot of categories and subcateories. To get the outline I want, I simply prefixed the pages and subpages so that they would stay in my outline order.
Zim will arrange things according to the letter (A., B, a., b., c., etc) or number (1., 2., 3., etc.). This way I can keep my outline points and subpoints to stay where I want them on Zim’s index.
There are a number of ways to create new linked pages in Zim. The challenge was trying to link pages in my text to the same location as those listed in my index pane. If I created a new page page from the text itself, it popped up in the index as a new and separate page. I finally figured out to copy the link location in the index and link the text to it.
Once I copied the link location I could highlight “Bibliography” in the text pane and select “link”. I pasted the link location in the “Link to:” field, hit “link,” and the job was done.
I tried browse button as well, but it would link me to the text files that Zim had created, not to the Zim page itself.
In the above example, I can now access my Bibliography page from either the index or the “7. End Matter” page.
Figuring out how to use Zim to meet my personal writing needs took quite a bit of trial and error, but – I think I’ve got it. I can write my entire text in Zim, enjoying the organization of it, and not have to bother with LibreOffice Writer at all. Zim will export each page as a text file, which makes it perfect for importing into Scribus.
Maybe I can now get down to some serious work.
