Mac Requirements: Mac OS 7.x or later (Mac OS 8 savvy), 4 MB RAM, 4 MB hard disk space recommended, runs native on both PowerPC and 680x0
 
Overview
According to Webster's New World Dictionary, a palimpsest is "a parchment, tablet, etc. that has been written upon or inscribed two or three times, the previous text or texts having been imperfectly erased and remaining, therefore, still partly visible."
Palimpsest — by an Australian company called Western Civilisation — is a hypertext authoring system, a program for creating and managing documents and establishing links between them. Western Civilisation says, "People use Palimpsest to create sophisticated hypertext knowledgebases — collections of texts, if you will. Anyone whose work, study, teaching, or discipline involves reading and writing will find Palimpsest indispensable, if they want to take their work away from pen, paper, and books and onto their computer." Essentially Palimpsest is used to annotate, cross-reference, and create links between documents.
 
It's Not HTML
In learning to use Palimpsest, the first challenge is to jettison one's preconceptions about how hypertext should behave. For most of us, hypertext means the World Wide Web, and we therefore expect any hypertext system to behave exactly like HTML. While there are some basic conceptual similarities, Palimpsest is best approached on its own terms. The steepness of Palimpsest's learning curve will probably depend on how easy (or difficult) it is to leave those Web-created expectations behind.
 
Creating Documents
In its most basic form, Palimpsest is a word processor: you use it to create text documents. Selecting New... from the "File" menu brings up a dialog box with four radio-button items: Document, Document Type, Paper, or Picture. Making a new Document brings up another dialog, in which you select which Document Type you'd like to use from a popup menu. You can use the default Document Types that come built into Palimpsest (Decision, Generic Novel, Generic Play, Generic Type, and Manual) or you can define your own custom Document Type to use as a template. After choosing the type of your document, you'll be prompted to name it and save it to disk.
Next you're presented with the Table of Contents for your document, which will at first be empty. Using the "Section" menu, you can create new sections or chapters for the TOC by selecting New Section... , or you can add existing sections by selecting Add Section... . Once you're finished adding sections, you double-click the section you wish to work on and begin writing.
If this sounds fairly convoluted to you, it is. It certainly requires many more preliminary steps before you can begin writing than you'd find in a standard word processor. But the strength of Palimpsest (and its reason for being) is its ability to lay out and organize complicated documents, and that organization begins right up front. So wading through all these dialogs is a necessary evil required to take advantage of Palimpsest's specialized features.
 
Annotations
One of Palimpsest's key features is its ability to easily annotate text. Highlight a word or phrase, then choose Make Annotation from the "Hypertext" menu (or click the corresponding button on
the tool palette). 
A new window will open, with fields showing what
document the annotation belongs to, the selected text,
the commentary (the annotation itself), who created
the comment, the date it was created, and a popup menu
showing a label for the type of annotation (None,
Agreement, Allusion, cf., Citation, Disagreement,
Example, Explanation, Qualification, or Translation).
When you use Palimpsest in the read-only Browse Mode (selectable from the "Utilities" menu), annotations are colored red. Clicking on the red text opens the annotation window.
 
Cross-References
Another important feature is the ability to cross-reference. Selected text can be used to link to other sections within your document. In Browse Mode, these two-way links are blue, similar to hypertext links on the Web. They offer a convenient way to navigate through large documents.
 
 
Other Features
Palimpsest makes excellent use of balloon help, which is really invaluable when first learning to use the program. The included documentation is thorough and well-written (although a bit on the dry side).
In addition to text, pictures can be easily imported into Palimpsest documents. A fast and powerful search function is built-in. Concordances (lists of the important words used in a document) can be easily generated.
A built-in Web converter will transform your Palimpsest documents into Websites, preserving all the internal links.
Palimpsest's $50 price tag includes email-based technical support from Western Civilisation, and also entitles you to all upgrades which become available for the following 12 months.
 
Conclusion
At times, Palimpsest seemed needlessly over-complicated, with too many user-defined parameters that might better be hidden for the sake of ease-of-use. But the more I worked with Palimpsest, the more I came to appreciate its power and flexibility in creating complex documents. The most obvious application for Palimpsest lies in the academic field: for anyone doing scholarly work, Palimpsest is an ideal tool.
