Is this even possible Recreate WordPerfect's Perfect Authority

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Vanceone
Posts: 211
Joined: 2013-05-03 07:06:31

Is this even possible Recreate WordPerfect's Perfect Authority

Post by Vanceone »

Howdy folks.

As some may know, I work in the Legal Field, and I do a lot of legal briefs. One of the integral parts of a legal brief is the Table of Authorities.

Essentially, the Table of Authorities is an index, broken down by sections, with cases, statutes, rules, treatises/ law review ariicles, and so forth.

The requirements are strict: each Court has their own citation style, almost all based off of the Harvard "BlueBook". We don't do MLA or Turbian or other citation formats.

Creating a Table of Authorities is tedious. One of the primary reasons I use Nisus Writer is the "Database" feature, so to speak, of marking indexes using a list in another file. Word doesn't do that; you have to create and mark all your citations manually, every single time.

Switching gears: the last stronghold of WordPerfect is in the legal field, primarily because they have several features dedicated to legal work. Bates numbering is one of them. And something called "Perfect Authority", an add-on, is another. Here's a link: https://www.wordperfect.com/en/product/ ... /#overview

Essentially, it is an automatic Table of Authorities builder. It scans, finds citations, marks them, puts them in the desired format then generates the Table of Authorities. It makes it easy to do, at the click of a button. (note-- I know Nisus has integration with Bookends, I think it is, but as far as I know Bookends does not have legal citation support)

I think Nisus could do something like Perfect Authority, but I have to image the scripting would be likely a few thousand lines. Is such a thing possible? If Nisus could pull it off, it might become the leading legal word processor for Macs -- especially since I believe Nisus' PDF handling is also better than Word's.
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