Actually, a Wacom Cintiq supports a wider range of pressure input, and also supports Intus-specific features like tilt. If one can forego portability / mobility, it is a compelling choice, which can pay off in improved productivity for high-end usage.
It is really unfortunate the Apple hasn't done a tablet since the Newton --- using Rosetta w/ a Wacom is nice, but a pen-enabled Finder and pen tablet running Mac OS X could be a really nice tool.
William (who gave up on waiting for Apple to make a tablet and got a Fujitsu Stylistic)
This depends on your value / definition of ``native''.
While I'll grant it's just about indistinguishable from a native app in Windows, in Mac OS X, while it's very nice and quite ``aquafied'', unfortunately there's a lot which isn't supported --- Services come to mind. I really wish someone would do a Cocoa front-end for LyX in Mac OS X.
William (who uses LyX in Windows 2000 'cause it supports his handwriting recognition program on his pen slate;)
By "query" I meant being able to do sums and totals &c. of all of the data. Say something like Lotus Improv but with a freer structure. A hybrid of a note-taking program PIM and database. Having an AI like sBook would be nice.
What I really want to see is an app that allows one to identify discrete bits of data in text stream and then query it in an ad hoc fashion much as you obliquely describe.
William (who remembers his GRiD laptop with great fondness.)
While the overall UI leaves a bit to be desired (PenPoint was much nicer than Windows for Pen Computing 'cause it was built from the ground up as a ``pen-centric'' UI, while Windows for Pen Computing grafter pen interaction on as an afterthought) and Windows XP Professional Tablet PC Edition continues in this vein, there are some really brilliant UI designs / concepts:
- Alias Sketchbook (pie menus done right --- any tool / option is a pen flick away)
- Ambient Design's ArtRage (too much fun for words and you can't beat the price)
- Evernote's ritePen (HWR w/ on-screen correction palette which is almost as nice as Calligrapher on the Newton --- darned shame that EverNote doesn't allow mixing text and ink as the Newton did....)
- FutureWave's SmartSketch (Absolutely brilliant drawing program using only the pen --- I'm really glad I picked up a copy of this, and it's really unfortunate that all that's left of this is what's in Flash and the soon-to-disappear FreeHand)
Probably the best thing to hope for would be a pen-enabled Windows Explorer replacement --- something like PenPoint's Notebook.
``As an MIT undergrad in 1975, Hillis and his friends built a binary computer out of 10,000 Tinkertoy pieces. It could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe.''
Okay, I _must_ know this secret --- I've taught my kids to play, and while I can still beat my son (age 5), my daughter and I _always_ wind up with a tie. I even saw a movie once where this nifty supercomputer called Joshua couldn't win a game....
Most have decent collections of audio materials on tape and / or CD --- when I was commuting like that, I paid $20 to get a membership in a library near my workplace in addition to the membership I already had in the local library (they weren't reciprocal) and usually managed to have a sufficient selection to keep my mind occupied during the commute --- did get some audio books as gifts, and bought a few others at need, but using the library kept it affordable.
``Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.'' (anyone know who said that? My copy of Bartlett's is at home)
Find me an alternative to Cerilica's Truism ( http://www.cerilica.com/truism/index.htm ) for any other platform at a similar price, otherwise, it seems to me Risc OS has a unique advantage for people doing commercial print work.
While there're some amusing bits about Bill Gates using a Mac over at www.folklore.org, the only solid datapoint I've seen of late has been print and anecdotal mentions of his _very_ active participation in Tablet PC development with one magazine article noting he sent them at least one e-mail a day.
William (who wished Apple would do a Tablet successor to the Newton, but now has Windows 2000, Evernote and Ritepen on his Fujitsu Stylistic and doesn't feel the lack so much any longer)
Xara is a tool I've often wished that I liked when I tried it. Can't recall the last time I tried a demo or a copy from a magazine disk, but the following things from FreeHand I'm not finding equivalents to in my quest for a replacement for FreeHand and Altsys Virtuoso:
- snap to document-setup-page (AI in particular doesn't do this, and it irritates me a lot and wastes a lot of time when trying to get art set to a standard size for a job)
- ability to place bezier curve points, and move just placed points and constrain and control off-curve points with a single tool
- easy deletion of nodes on a bezier path
- quick selection of stacked objects (Freehand allows one to Control-click through a stack, AI makes one use a contextual menu or the layer palette, or if it's only a two-deep stack and you want the bottom, select both, then deselect the top)
- easy expansion of a selection (in FreeHand just tap the tilde key (`) and a sub-selected path's selection is expanded to the compleat object)
- sensible alignment of objects (AI in particular has bizarre rules for this --- so bizarre there's a plug-in to address this)
- ability to align sub-selected bezier on-curve points to objects while not altering any other points in an object (AI can't do this)
- use PostScript code for strokes and fills --- especially nice for doing dimension lines (Canvas has this built in though, while there're plug-ins for AI)
- graphic find and replace
- OpenType and Unicode support and a decent Type palette (Adobe Illustrator CS and CS2 really shine on this front. The nifty opensource program Cenon (http://www.cenon.info/ does quite nicely in its Mac OS X incarnation using Apple Advanced Typography). See http://members.aol.com/willadams/gnustep/type/inde x.html for a discussion of this sort of thing.
The 128KB Mac had a connector for a second (external) floppy drive, and they were available in 1984 for those who didn't want to do the ``floppy shuffle''
Okay, what would be the feasibility of making an autonomous unit which floats on the ocean, anchors to the ice pack and covers the water around it w/ solar cells and uses the energy from the solar cells to extract salt from the sea water, chill it and spray it towards the ice pack?
Set it up so that it disengages and re-anchors itself as the ice pack increases in size and it should ``just work''. Add a GPS unit and a radio transmitter and you can keep track of the edge (but not thickness and density --- you can use a submarine fleet doing maintenance on these things for that).
Unfortunately, using ``tug typesetting'' as limiting terms filters out too many posts or web pages which I've found useful. The TeX User's Group is an excellent resource, and I contribute to it as best I can (quite often since TUG's support e-mail address was piped through to texhax), but there's quite a bit more out there.
I happen to use a certain typesetting system[1] whose most prevalent macro package is named for a fetishist material[2] --- it can be downright embarrassing sometimes at work trying to look up solutions for specific difficulties.
And of course, this sort of thing isn't helped by bookmarked sites going away and being purchased by others for far different uses[3]
Other inocuous terms can have similar difficulties --- try ``baby doll'' sometime.
Moreover, at that time it was scandalous and considered salacious for a man to want a zipper in his trousers --- why on earth would a person need to undress quickly. It was this social mindset which Huxley was commenting on / making use of.
I've read a number of books to my kids using my Fujitsu Stylistic and have several GBs of ebooks and texts on it. The kids like it, and it's very convenient (no wondering where the book is, or what place I was at since the reader (I use ybook (.txt) and mu-book (.html) and the Adobe (formerly Glassbook) eBook Reader (.pdf))
Take a look at sites like http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/ and you'll find lots of people using tablets for lots of reading and studying.
And look at John Mark Ockerbloom's Online books page for an exhaustive list of what's freely available.
Actually, the CDC has already looked into this, running in at least one team of state troopers led by a scientist with bolt cutters to destroy all of the hazardous samples &c. (all possible scientific value was lost when the power failed allowing samples to thaw &c.)
I don't see the big issue about moving away from Computer Modern / METAFONTs --- it was an unfortunate lack of planning that had TeX so tightly coupled w/ CMR, one which a lot of people have been working very hard to move away from. Moreover, one can do margin kerning / character protusion / hanging punctation w/ CMR, even the MF versions which wind up in a.pdf as Type 3 bitmap fonts. One the plus side for MF and CMR one gets controllable output parameters for adjusting for specific output devices (e.g., write white versus write black laserprinters --- there's a similar capability for Type 1 fonts, but it's not as accessible or controllable).
The limited optical size options for OpenType is maddening --- especially since the decision which led to it also costs one style and weight axes. Oh well, at least QuickDraw/GX has survived as AAT and still has such features.
pdftex's character protrusion feature is a lot more robust and flexible than using active characters, have you read Thanh's thesis? Also, if you spec dimens in sps you never have to use \pnt
I'm never satisfied about my work until bluelines or some other film-based proof shows up. proofing on a laser is neat, but only an approximation of the final product.
XeTeX is an excellent example of what TeX can do. Will Robertson's fontspec package (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/xetex/late x/fontspec/) provides a nice interface to both OpenType and Apple Advanced Typography font capabilities --- it's the latter which I'm taking advantage of in my design, a font with an optical axis and two design axes. Darned shame Adobe let Multiple Master font whither. After that I do have plans for a METAFONT which I'm hoping will push the envelope on what can be done with MF.
MF vs. OT? Garamond Premier Pro has four sizes: Caption, Normal, Subhead and Display (and this seems to be all Adobe plans to do these days, see http://store.adobe.com/type/topics/opticalsize.htm l); Computer Modern has eight sizes (5,6,7,8,9,10,12,17). The typeface revival I'm working on had 15 sizes in hot metal, plus a lithographed poster (which has provided interesting insights into the design).
Sure, I could have 15 different named fonts, but even when setting style sheets it's tedious to change the size twice, and it makes for ungainly font menus. That also fails to address the two style axes (and if things continue to go well I'll probably do a weight axis --- the foundry did a demi-bold)
If Apple were to do this, the best thing to do would be to re-write ITunes as a Cocoa app (a good thing) and resurrect ``Yellow Box'' for Windows (something which Apple shied away from) and up-date enough of GNUstep to make iTunes work there by just recompiling (something which Apple is probably worried about 'cause then people could run more software on Linux instead of Mac OS X)
I don't have a PhD, and I've managed to get every font I've ever wanted installed, with far nicer results than are possible with Word (being able to kern in 1sp units (about the size of a nitrogen atom) doesn't compare to.rtf's limitation of a twip (1/20th of a PostScript (Big) point).
I'm also currently finishing up a typeface design which'll push the boundaries of what TeX can handle, and which can't be easily managed in InDesign 'cause of it's OpenType UI/feature-access limitations.
Hanging punctuation, to quote DEK's TeXbook ``is an easier problem'' and there's code for it --- you can see an example of this in use at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase --- look for Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_ pdftex makes it happen automagically in the tex engine itself, see _The LaTeX Companion, 2nd Edition_ for an example of this done for a dvips processed file.
XeTeX ( http://scripts.sil.org/xetex ) allows one to access _any_ OpenType or AAT font installed in Mac OS X and have access to _all_ of its features. There's been some discussion of making a version not tied to Apple's pdf engine.
Funny you should mention Zapfino --- here's a technique for fully taking advantage of it in TeX (well, Omega):
William (who would be glad of further translations for ``Peace on earth, good will to men.'' --- I've gotten Arabic, and am going to extend it beyond using just Zapfino)
Depending on your needs, you might find a drawing program of use --- I use Futurewave SmartSketch (old PenPoint program ported to Mac OS and Windows which morphed into Flash) on my Stylistic 2300
The problems w/ paper are the synching / uploading to a computer (boring and tedious, potentially error prone if one is typing) and the re-arranging / re-use angle. Levenger's Circa (also sold as Rollabind) can help with the re-use, and I used such notebooks (just get a punch and a bunch of disks, pass on the over-priced paper) quite a bit in college, esp. for art classes.
But, I really found my Newton to be quite a bit more useful --- the synching and the desktop client wasn't as nice as a Palm Pilot / Desktop, but it worked, and I never had to re-type anything, and I could directly place my outline / notes directly into Word and start immediately on papers &c.
That said, these days I'm using a pen slate instead (had an NCR-3125 in college, but the battery life was too brief to be of use except for in classes where I was certain to be able to sit next to a power outlet). No problems with synching (it's my main system, I just copy stuff over the network to my NeXT Cube when I dock it), and it's quite nice to have over 1GB of ebooks to read or take notes in, and the option of using Word, LyX, FreeHand, SmartSketch or IBM Ink Manager when I want to get some work done, and having all of my mp3s to listen to as I work.
In the game _Discworld_, based on Terry Pratchett's hilarious fantasy series, the main character is followed about by an indestructible, infinite-capacity chest w/ legs.
Well worth running down a copy of the game (_and_ the hint book --- the game is almost unsolvable w/o it) 'cause it's delightful for those who enjoy this sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, a Wacom Cintiq supports a wider range of pressure input, and also supports Intus-specific features like tilt. If one can forego portability / mobility, it is a compelling choice, which can pay off in improved productivity for high-end usage.
It is really unfortunate the Apple hasn't done a tablet since the Newton --- using Rosetta w/ a Wacom is nice, but a pen-enabled Finder and pen tablet running Mac OS X could be a really nice tool.
William
(who gave up on waiting for Apple to make a tablet and got a Fujitsu Stylistic)
(LaTeX runs native in Windows and Mac OS X)
;)
This depends on your value / definition of ``native''.
While I'll grant it's just about indistinguishable from a native app in Windows, in Mac OS X, while it's very nice and quite ``aquafied'', unfortunately there's a lot which isn't supported --- Services come to mind. I really wish someone would do a Cocoa front-end for LyX in Mac OS X.
William
(who uses LyX in Windows 2000 'cause it supports his handwriting recognition program on his pen slate
By "query" I meant being able to do sums and totals &c. of all of the data. Say something like Lotus Improv but with a freer structure. A hybrid of a note-taking program PIM and database. Having an AI like sBook would be nice.
William
What I really want to see is an app that allows one to identify discrete bits of data in text stream and then query it in an ad hoc fashion much as you obliquely describe.
William
(who remembers his GRiD laptop with great fondness.)
Well, it depends.
While the overall UI leaves a bit to be desired (PenPoint was much nicer than Windows for Pen Computing 'cause it was built from the ground up as a ``pen-centric'' UI, while Windows for Pen Computing grafter pen interaction on as an afterthought) and Windows XP Professional Tablet PC Edition continues in this vein, there are some really brilliant UI designs / concepts:
- Alias Sketchbook (pie menus done right --- any tool / option is a pen flick away)
- Ambient Design's ArtRage (too much fun for words and you can't beat the price)
- Evernote's ritePen (HWR w/ on-screen correction palette which is almost as nice as Calligrapher on the Newton --- darned shame that EverNote doesn't allow mixing text and ink as the Newton did....)
- FutureWave's SmartSketch (Absolutely brilliant drawing program using only the pen --- I'm really glad I picked up a copy of this, and it's really unfortunate that all that's left of this is what's in Flash and the soon-to-disappear FreeHand)
Probably the best thing to hope for would be a pen-enabled Windows Explorer replacement --- something like PenPoint's Notebook.
William
From TFA:
``As an MIT undergrad in 1975, Hillis and his friends built a binary computer out of 10,000 Tinkertoy pieces. It could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe.''
Okay, I _must_ know this secret --- I've taught my kids to play, and while I can still beat my son (age 5), my daughter and I _always_ wind up with a tie. I even saw a movie once where this nifty supercomputer called Joshua couldn't win a game....
William
Are you a member of your local library?
Most have decent collections of audio materials on tape and / or CD --- when I was commuting like that, I paid $20 to get a membership in a library near my workplace in addition to the membership I already had in the local library (they weren't reciprocal) and usually managed to have a sufficient selection to keep my mind occupied during the commute --- did get some audio books as gifts, and bought a few others at need, but using the library kept it affordable.
``Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.'' (anyone know who said that? My copy of Bartlett's is at home)
William
Find me an alternative to Cerilica's Truism ( http://www.cerilica.com/truism/index.htm ) for any other platform at a similar price, otherwise, it seems to me Risc OS has a unique advantage for people doing commercial print work.
William
While there're some amusing bits about Bill Gates using a Mac over at www.folklore.org, the only solid datapoint I've seen of late has been print and anecdotal mentions of his _very_ active participation in Tablet PC development with one magazine article noting he sent them at least one e-mail a day.
William
(who wished Apple would do a Tablet successor to the Newton, but now has Windows 2000, Evernote and Ritepen on his Fujitsu Stylistic and doesn't feel the lack so much any longer)
Xara is a tool I've often wished that I liked when I tried it. Can't recall the last time I tried a demo or a copy from a magazine disk, but the following things from FreeHand I'm not finding equivalents to in my quest for a replacement for FreeHand and Altsys Virtuoso:
e x.html for a discussion of this sort of thing.
- snap to document-setup-page (AI in particular doesn't do this, and it irritates me a lot and wastes a lot of time when trying to get art set to a standard size for a job)
- ability to place bezier curve points, and move just placed points and constrain and control off-curve points with a single tool
- easy deletion of nodes on a bezier path
- quick selection of stacked objects (Freehand allows one to Control-click through a stack, AI makes one use a contextual menu or the layer palette, or if it's only a two-deep stack and you want the bottom, select both, then deselect the top)
- easy expansion of a selection (in FreeHand just tap the tilde key (`) and a sub-selected path's selection is expanded to the compleat object)
- sensible alignment of objects (AI in particular has bizarre rules for this --- so bizarre there's a plug-in to address this)
- ability to align sub-selected bezier on-curve points to objects while not altering any other points in an object (AI can't do this)
- use PostScript code for strokes and fills --- especially nice for doing dimension lines (Canvas has this built in though, while there're plug-ins for AI)
- graphic find and replace
- OpenType and Unicode support and a decent Type palette (Adobe Illustrator CS and CS2 really shine on this front. The nifty opensource program Cenon (http://www.cenon.info/ does quite nicely in its Mac OS X incarnation using Apple Advanced Typography). See http://members.aol.com/willadams/gnustep/type/ind
William
The 128KB Mac had a connector for a second (external) floppy drive, and they were available in 1984 for those who didn't want to do the ``floppy shuffle''
William
(and measure at the same time)
Okay, what would be the feasibility of making an autonomous unit which floats on the ocean, anchors to the ice pack and covers the water around it w/ solar cells and uses the energy from the solar cells to extract salt from the sea water, chill it and spray it towards the ice pack?
Set it up so that it disengages and re-anchors itself as the ice pack increases in size and it should ``just work''. Add a GPS unit and a radio transmitter and you can keep track of the edge (but not thickness and density --- you can use a submarine fleet doing maintenance on these things for that).
William
Unfortunately, using ``tug typesetting'' as limiting terms filters out too many posts or web pages which I've found useful. The TeX User's Group is an excellent resource, and I contribute to it as best I can (quite often since TUG's support e-mail address was piped through to texhax), but there's quite a bit more out there.
William
Correction.
``named for'' in the above should be ``named the same as''
William
Depends on your search terms.
I happen to use a certain typesetting system[1] whose most prevalent macro package is named for a fetishist material[2] --- it can be downright embarrassing sometimes at work trying to look up solutions for specific difficulties.
And of course, this sort of thing isn't helped by bookmarked sites going away and being purchased by others for far different uses[3]
Other inocuous terms can have similar difficulties --- try ``baby doll'' sometime.
William
[1] TeX http://www.tug.org/
[2] LaTeX http://www.latex-project.org/
[3] the company which was Y&Y and sold fonts web site isn't about fonts anymore. http://www.yandy.com/
Moreover, at that time it was scandalous and considered salacious for a man to want a zipper in his trousers --- why on earth would a person need to undress quickly. It was this social mindset which Huxley was commenting on / making use of.
William
I've read a number of books to my kids using my Fujitsu Stylistic and have several GBs of ebooks and texts on it. The kids like it, and it's very convenient (no wondering where the book is, or what place I was at since the reader (I use ybook (.txt) and mu-book (.html) and the Adobe (formerly Glassbook) eBook Reader (.pdf))
/ leonardo/Review%20Leonardo%20da%20Vinci.html for a more even-handed review (it's not a perfect experience, and I really wish it wasn't hard-coded to run in 640 x 480)
Take a look at sites like http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/ and you'll find lots of people using tablets for lots of reading and studying.
And look at John Mark Ockerbloom's Online books page for an exhaustive list of what's freely available.
It's unfortunate that innovative things like Corbis' Leonardo CD-ROM w/ its cool translating, mirror-imaging magnifying glass didn't stay the course for when tablets became available (reading the Codex Leceister from this on a tablet is an amazing experience). For a glowing review see: http://www.businessweek.com/1996/49/b350428.htm c.f. http://www.mmi.unimaas.nl/people/Veltman/articles
Voyager had the right idea with their ``Expanded Books'' it's just that they were a couple of years early.
William
(who really needs to find the time to get his wife's copy of _The Manhole_ running in a Mac emulator on his tablet)
Actually, the CDC has already looked into this, running in at least one team of state troopers led by a scientist with bolt cutters to destroy all of the hazardous samples &c. (all possible scientific value was lost when the power failed allowing samples to thaw &c.)
a trina_lost_research
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050914/ap_on_he_me/k
Apparently all other sites were relatively undamaged and were still secure.
William
I don't see the big issue about moving away from Computer Modern / METAFONTs --- it was an unfortunate lack of planning that had TeX so tightly coupled w/ CMR, one which a lot of people have been working very hard to move away from. Moreover, one can do margin kerning / character protusion / hanging punctation w/ CMR, even the MF versions which wind up in a .pdf as Type 3 bitmap fonts. One the plus side for MF and CMR one gets controllable output parameters for adjusting for specific output devices (e.g., write white versus write black laserprinters --- there's a similar capability for Type 1 fonts, but it's not as accessible or controllable).
The limited optical size options for OpenType is maddening --- especially since the decision which led to it also costs one style and weight axes. Oh well, at least QuickDraw/GX has survived as AAT and still has such features.
William
My apologies for the swear word. Rough weekend.
e x/fontspec/) provides a nice interface to both OpenType and Apple Advanced Typography font capabilities --- it's the latter which I'm taking advantage of in my design, a font with an optical axis and two design axes. Darned shame Adobe let Multiple Master font whither. After that I do have plans for a METAFONT which I'm hoping will push the envelope on what can be done with MF.
m l); Computer Modern has eight sizes (5,6,7,8,9,10,12,17). The typeface revival I'm working on had 15 sizes in hot metal, plus a lithographed poster (which has provided interesting insights into the design).
pdftex's character protrusion feature is a lot more robust and flexible than using active characters, have you read Thanh's thesis? Also, if you spec dimens in sps you never have to use \pnt
I'm never satisfied about my work until bluelines or some other film-based proof shows up. proofing on a laser is neat, but only an approximation of the final product.
XeTeX is an excellent example of what TeX can do. Will Robertson's fontspec package (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/xetex/lat
MF vs. OT? Garamond Premier Pro has four sizes: Caption, Normal, Subhead and Display (and this seems to be all Adobe plans to do these days, see http://store.adobe.com/type/topics/opticalsize.ht
Sure, I could have 15 different named fonts, but even when setting style sheets it's tedious to change the size twice, and it makes for ungainly font menus. That also fails to address the two style axes (and if things continue to go well I'll probably do a weight axis --- the foundry did a demi-bold)
William
Interesting and scary.
If Apple were to do this, the best thing to do would be to re-write ITunes as a Cocoa app (a good thing) and resurrect ``Yellow Box'' for Windows (something which Apple shied away from) and up-date enough of GNUstep to make iTunes work there by just recompiling (something which Apple is probably worried about 'cause then people could run more software on Linux instead of Mac OS X)
William
Bullshit.
.rtf's limitation of a twip (1/20th of a PostScript (Big) point).
a ms.pdf
a phy/peace_on_earth.pdf
I don't have a PhD, and I've managed to get every font I've ever wanted installed, with far nicer results than are possible with Word (being able to kern in 1sp units (about the size of a nitrogen atom) doesn't compare to
I'm also currently finishing up a typeface design which'll push the boundaries of what TeX can handle, and which can't be easily managed in InDesign 'cause of it's OpenType UI/feature-access limitations.
Hanging punctuation, to quote DEK's TeXbook ``is an easier problem'' and there's code for it --- you can see an example of this in use at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase --- look for Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_ pdftex makes it happen automagically in the tex engine itself, see _The LaTeX Companion, 2nd Edition_ for an example of this done for a dvips processed file.
XeTeX ( http://scripts.sil.org/xetex ) allows one to access _any_ OpenType or AAT font installed in Mac OS X and have access to _all_ of its features. There's been some discussion of making a version not tied to Apple's pdf engine.
Funny you should mention Zapfino --- here's a technique for fully taking advantage of it in TeX (well, Omega):
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77ad
and here's an example file:
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typogr
William
(who would be glad of further translations for ``Peace on earth, good will to men.'' --- I've gotten Arabic, and am going to extend it beyond using just Zapfino)
So graphical tools are good for this problem-space, depending upon your needs.
Here're two projects inspired by Microsoft Journal:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/jarnal/
http://www.adebenham.com/gournal/
Depending on your needs, you might find a drawing program of use --- I use Futurewave SmartSketch (old PenPoint program ported to Mac OS and Windows which morphed into Flash) on my Stylistic 2300
So look at
http://www.cenon.info/
or use GIMP for bitmaps
If you do a lot of math, you may find the Freehand Formula Entry System (FFES) of use:
http://www.cs.queensu.ca/drl/ffes/
William
The problems w/ paper are the synching / uploading to a computer (boring and tedious, potentially error prone if one is typing) and the re-arranging / re-use angle. Levenger's Circa (also sold as Rollabind) can help with the re-use, and I used such notebooks (just get a punch and a bunch of disks, pass on the over-priced paper) quite a bit in college, esp. for art classes.
But, I really found my Newton to be quite a bit more useful --- the synching and the desktop client wasn't as nice as a Palm Pilot / Desktop, but it worked, and I never had to re-type anything, and I could directly place my outline / notes directly into Word and start immediately on papers &c.
That said, these days I'm using a pen slate instead (had an NCR-3125 in college, but the battery life was too brief to be of use except for in classes where I was certain to be able to sit next to a power outlet). No problems with synching (it's my main system, I just copy stuff over the network to my NeXT Cube when I dock it), and it's quite nice to have over 1GB of ebooks to read or take notes in, and the option of using Word, LyX, FreeHand, SmartSketch or IBM Ink Manager when I want to get some work done, and having all of my mp3s to listen to as I work.
William
In the game _Discworld_, based on Terry Pratchett's hilarious fantasy series, the main character is followed about by an indestructible, infinite-capacity chest w/ legs.
Well worth running down a copy of the game (_and_ the hint book --- the game is almost unsolvable w/o it) 'cause it's delightful for those who enjoy this sort of thing.
William