Nota Bene (NB) began as an MS-DOS program in 1982, built on the engine of the word processor XyWrite.
Its creator, Steven Siebert, then a doctoral student in philosophy and religious studies at Yale, used a PC to take reading notes, but had no easy computer-based mechanism for searching through them, or for finding relationships and connections in the material.
He wanted a word processor with an integrated "textbase" to automate finding text with Boolean searches, and an integrated bibliographical database that would automate the process of entering repeat citations correctly, and be easy to change for submission to publishers with different style-manual requirements.
It was shown in pre-release in November 1998, at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature.
Nota Bene for Windows suite retained and refined Ibidem, Orbis, and the XyWrite-based programming language XPL.
Implementation of an academic style means that the submission of manuscript to journals and book publishers will conform to editors’ requirements, and that camera-ready documents can be more easily constructed.
The Lingua enabled Workstation integrates non-Western languages into the NB word processor, Orbis and Ibidem, including Hebrew, Cyrillic and Greek, Arabic, Persian (Farsi) and Urdu, along with the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Additional Lingua modules extend language capabilities to include Coptic, Syriac, Ugaritic and Akkadian.
Otherwise, the Nota Bene Workstation word processor includes the usual features of similar contemporary products, such as templates, spell-checking, change-tracking, outlining and hyperlinking.
In addition, it provides three independent sets of footnotes/endnotes, the capacity to insert boilerplate from phrase libraries, the means of generating indexes, tables of contents and cross-references, and tools designed to handle book-length manuscripts Documents are saved with the default .nb extension or with a user-designated extension.
In addition to employing Microsoft Windows' Graphical User Interface, the Nota Bene word processor provides for viewing and editing all the formatting commands used in a given document.
Currently, a Nota Bene users’ discussion group is provided through H-Net-Commons, part of H-Net, the Humanities and Social Sciences Online organization, hosted by Michigan State University.
[7] The strengths of the Nota Bene word processor are speed, flexibility, customization, and handling of book-length manuscripts.
Nota Bene refers to Orbis as a "textbase," that is, a database management program dedicated to text-based content analysis.
Search matches are shown in user-selected linguistic units: sentences, paragraphs (the default), and entire documents.
If citations are included in the copied data, they will be automatically formatted to conform to the style used in the receiving document.
Orbis comes with dedicated templates suitable for interviews, and for searching English, Greek and Hebrew Biblical texts.
Archiva’s tools include a z39.50 client used to search on-line catalogues of university libraries and research centers world wide.