This was an idea I put out there 15 years ago (!) , and thought about reviving it. Since then I've seen/tried software such as Zotero and Mendeley, but this idea has still a different twist (see below).

THE IDEA
I was looking for a good software that would help me with my research, but I haven't quite found what I needed. Doing research, you take a lot of notes, and we all know that it is important to cite our works. I was looking for something that would help me organize my notes and help me create my works cited or bibliography page.

The only freeware I found is Scholar's Aid Lite, but it has a lot of extra things which I find not necessary and a lot of important features which I find imperative. I was looking for something essential, which could be useful both for the scholar and for the general high school student preparing a research project or thesis.


Here's what I was looking for in the "ideal" scholarly research software, which I've divided into two sections (taking notes and compiling the bibliography):

Note-taking
My idea takes off of something like Biblio2 <http://www.scholarsoft.com/biblio2.htm> (just looking at the GUI you can tell it's an older prog and hasn't been maintained for years) but with some other functions (tagging, portability etc): I read a book (chapter, article, webpage, etc) and I can input various notes to create a tree outline of the text (like i'd do with Keynote or similar). Each note is tied to its reference, which I input following bibliographical standards (MLA or APA are the most famous). So I'll have the head of the list being the reference, and each note hierarchically listed below, each of which includes the page off of which I took the note.

Each note should be distinguished (by color/icon?) as a quote, a summary, or an idea and have a title and a "body" (like in Biblio) but some other "types" could be glossary, images, and general. Each note should have the possibility of having given tags and linking to other notes for easy cross-referencing and searching (which is the key here and which is what I haven't found in Biblio). I also think it would be great to have the possibility of having hotkeys to create new notes, etc.

When I've finished creating an outline of each book, article, webpage or whatever, I should be able to export it or save it as an RTF or DOC. I should also be able to move around the notes so I can export or print my own mental maps using various notes from various lists (that is, using any note from any book or article). In this case the bibliographical reference should travel with the note and I should have the option of also exporting the reference with the page number at the end (see below).

Compiling your bibliography
The second part of the project should be to help me compile the bibliography. There are many websites out there that will help in formatting the bibliography using MLA or APA standards (like http://www.studentabc.com/builder and http://citationmachine.net/) and even a great freeware (http://www.biblioscape.com/biblioexpress.htm). It would be excellent to incorporate something like this within this program to make it complete, however I understand that it could become more complicated to create, especially if the coder doesn't know much about the citation system (MLA/APA). My idea would be a link to citationmachine.net where you'd be guided in the process and at the end you could copy and paste from the site both the Bibliographical citation (what would go in the bibliography) and the Parenthetical in text citations (what would travel with each note, simply adding the page number(s) before closing the parenthesis). These two pieces of information are important to keep wittied to each note.

The Bibliographical citations should be able to be organized in folders with tags and maybe a note, and should be able to be exported alphabetically, so you would have your References cited or Bibliography already compiled.

I think the key here is tagging and linking. If there would be a way to link each note to its reference, and you could create a system of tags, this would help you out in organizing your thoughts and creating effective outlines for your paper.

Often I've seen a lot of software created for almost futile reasons. I think something like this could help a lot of students in effectively organizing their thoughts and their research and be useful in their writing projects.

Hope to find a positive response! All the best!

Will tab names be modifyable for better seperation? You hopefully do autosave them to prevent loss on crash/quit.

-KodeZwerg (March 02, 2021, 10:44 AM)

I agree. I like the idea that you don't have to name them for them to be saved: an autogenerated name gets assigned and each file is autosaved every predefined N minutes, or they can be saved with name.

Thanks to both of you!

That is a syntax error.

-Ath (February 28, 2021, 12:19 PM)

I totally agree. It's just not a well-formed text.

Phrase was "meet at 9.7 ppl join"
You see, the dot seperates two sentences and is not meant as fraction seperator in that phrase.

-KodeZwerg (February 28, 2021, 10:44 AM)

Don't confuse what makes sense in the real world and what is meaningful computationally! :)

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Since LimitPad is meant to be a stand-alone plain text processor of sorts, helpful especially for online forms that require limited text, I have a few more ideas (dunno how you feel about them)!

1. I realize that some forms also have a minimum requirement (e.g., there has to be a minimum 150 chars for example before the form is accepted).

Since the solution for extra text would be to change the font color to red, I was thinking of how to visualize "still missing text". The only thing that I can think of is to change the bgcolor to a light red for the first n-defined chars spaces (which disappears when text is inputted).
What do you think? Maybe you or someone can think of a more elegant solution...

2. Along this line of reasoning, in the original case of maximum limit of n chars, it might be nice to have an option to see the available space even when nothing is there, something like seeing where the limit it by having the n+1 space bgcolor as light red.
This way I know how much space I still have to type. All text after that point becomes red (or you could keep it black with the light red bgcolor).


I'm quite excited about this project! I think it'll be quite useful! I know a lot of online websites where you have to insert feedback or upload information in text fields, so this will be useful! Most of them have character limits, so it's great you're focusing on that, and having word limits as an ulterior option is great!


I was thinking of future development (yes! even before you've published this!) Another idea for LimitPad is to include a minimal UI which resembles traditional wordpad (Think: Plain Text Wordpad!). I don't think this is high priority, but just to think about if you want to make it more aesthetically appealing/more marketable (I'm thinking something as easy as this: https://www.pongoresume.com/blogPosts/187/plain-text-resumes-how-to-make-them-a-little-less-ugly.cfm)!

Some minimal pseudo-formatting can happen with plain text (like what I'm doing below!), for example you could select the text or place in the document and via icons in the menu bar create:
- lists can be created with an asterisk or a dash and a space
- indent would be three spaces
- BOLD is all-caps
- you could insert horizontal "line" dividers with symbols like overlines or tildes
- If you define characters per line, you can have left/center/right justification
- You could eventually even add a spell-check
- etc.

There are lots of ways to create visual formatting even of plain text, or even to manipulate (convert case, upside-down text, and other more gimmicky stuff). But like I said, I would rather have a good release version of the base program first, and these are all things you could think about if you want to continue development!

I hope @publicdomain you're as excited as I am! Thanks again for your time and effort!!