"Overlapping" Structures (Conceptual Issue)

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Hello all,
I was thinking about an issue I have with outliners in general. It's 
more conceptual than technical and it's not specific to OO but I'm 
hoping to find a way (technique) to make this work with OO. So this is 
a cry for help (though I'm not desperate) with accompanying feature 
requests. Sorry for its length and apparent disorganization.
Maybe I just don't understand proper outline use...

The practical example of reading notes is this: as I read, I take notes 
that I associate with both textual structure (chapters, sections) and 
pages. However, these two structures overlap. A section may span 
several pages and a page may contain several sections.
My current practice (out of perceived convenience) is to have a page as 
a parent to all the notes on the page's content and handle 
multiple-page notes by adding the info on what pages it spans. When a 
section (and its subsections) spans several pages, I basically loose 
this structure.
Now, page numbers should probably be something else. But what? Being 
the children of these notes would be cumbersome and confusing. A better 
solution would be OO's columns, especially if we think of them as 
"properties" of notes. But I would need to type a page number for every 
item, which would take way too much time. In fact, I half-expected to 
be able to apply a single value to a column in several rows, but it 
doesn't work.
[Feature Request] There could be a column type where content would be 
inherited from the previous row but could be changed at will. So, if 
row 11 has the value "15" for column "page number," the following rows 
will inherit this value until I come to page 16 and type this value... 
That would be quite useful in this case.

An improved (but more difficult to explain) method would be to have 
"parallel" outlines, one with the notes (hierarchy of ideas) and the 
other with the textual structure (chapters and sections). As the OO 
team (well, Brian, at least) says linking is coming, there's hope for 
something similar.
[Feature Request] But what about two columns with outlines? It may 
sound weird, but it's not too hard to picture.

Just to show that this issue isn't limited to page numbers, imagine a 
course syllabus with numbered weeks and major sections. You want to 
have week numbers carry across sections but weeks are "within" sections.
[Feature Request] It'd be nice to have more flexibility with numbering 
in OO.

Thanks in advance for your help!
Sorry again for the length and weirdness.