One of the features I'm most excited about is the End Notes feature, and in the current implementation it is both simple and powerful to use. To make use of it, simply create a window in any format you want, make the first word in the window "Notes" (without the quotation marks), open the Interface Palette and choose wehther you want Textile markup or vanilla quotes (choose vanilla to start), and choose the new note command or shortcut in the location you want the quote, and Diamond inserts the Index number and then inserts a placeholder in the Notes window. On the next note (if any) Diamond will automatically increment the Index number.

There are some great features with the way this works. First, if you quit the app and close those windows, you can open them later, it picks up where it left off. You only have to set the starting note when you do the initial setup. Second, you can apply a series of notes to an existing text the same way, and whether doing that or inserting as you type, you can either move to the notes window and enter each note as you go along, or just let the skeleton build and put the notes per se in later.

I'm working on the utility to merge them now. There will be a simple merge of just appending the Notes to the original doc (which is easy to do by hand now) but in some document system there can be variations of this so I'm tinkering with some Workflow things that will allow Note Management. But all that will just build on the simple implementation we have now.

Simple, flexible, and powerful. The Diamond Way.

One thing I'll need if I start using Diamond seriously is the ability to export Diamond endnotes into RTF footnotes (Diamond itself wouldn't need to 'do footnoting' for me to be satisfied).

Endnotes are definitely the way to go for the writer -- especially in a writing environment like Diamond. But footnotes are definitely the way to go for the reader of a printed version: easy enough to ignore if you're determined to; much easier to find if you want them. But best of all, you expend no effort to get a feel for how much/little you'd be missing by ignoring.

I imagine that it would be easy enough to tuck a routine into the Export menu for RTF(footnotes) which would simply, globally replace the RTF codes of endnotes with the appropriate code that Nisus/Mariner/Pages would interpret as footnote instead. Leave the word processor/page layout program to do the hard work of repaginating.

Yes, great idea. An action that can be dropped into the compile notes Workflow, and that would encode the footnote flag, would be very easy to do. The first step of course is getting our hands on those codes. If we start simple and target just one of those apps you mentioned it would be easy to expand later (I would think) to any app that handles end/footnotes.

I'll be looking into this, as I'm going to be starting a big round of Automator/Diamond development. If there's any assistance you think you could offer please feel free to contact me directly (the bullet at the bottom of the menu on the right is an email link) -- sample copies of finished documents would be helpful so I know what to target in the embedded codes.

Thanks for the suggestion.