Text tags: What? Why?

[mkoskim]

Text tags

Scene tags were implemented in PR #192 - closing Issue #191.

What are text tags?

Text tags can be used to mark text blocks, which are covering the same thing, but may be moved far from each other in the story. For example, a tag can be a certain character, an artefact, a place or something like that. Currently they are implemented as their own paragraph, but later we might implement them as formatting style like bold and italics.

Text tags are meant to give you another way to group scenes together. Tags may help you to have clear view for parallel plot lines, or how a certain artefact is present in the story. Just remember: What we really work for, is putting the scenes in right order to form a story when exporting draft. If tags help that, they are fine. Otherwise they are useless.

There is currently just one feature related to tags: in editor view, you can choose tags in right panel, and clicking a tack will unfold all scenes containing that tag, and fold everything else. This is sort of "customized quick fold" feature. Later, we might add more tools for tagging.

Tags in other writer's tools

Let's take a look to Manuskript:

https://talltechtales.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/manuskript2.jpg

At the bottom of the picture, there is a horizontal box. There are plot lines in y-axis, and scenes at x-axis. If a scene is part of that particular plot line, it has a bullet on it. Another screenshot from Manuskript:

https://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/outliner-1.jpg

Here you can see how scene has POV property.

Autotagging?

See #217

One of my initial ideas to create tags is to attach a search pattern to them. For example, you could make a tag named "Albert" with search pattern "Albert", and another tag named "Bertta" with search pattern "Bertta".

When you are tagging scenes, MaweJS could show how many matches for the search pattern it finds in a scene. I could assume, that if a scene is written from Albert's perspective, it contains many mentions to Albert.

Showing the counts of matches would give you good indication, to what plot line it belongs. But in the end, tagging is manual work. MaweJS could give a suggestion based on search pattern, but the writer decides if that suggestion is correct or not.

[peter88213]

This looks like the "relationships" concept. With yWriter, you can assign characters, locations, and items to scenes.
novelibre copies this concept and extends it with plot lines. There's also a matrix view/editor available:

NovelWriter has a system of tags and references that probably comes very close to your ideas.

[mkoskim]

This looks like the "relationships" concept.

Yes, it is. I have thought to use it to create relationships between scenes, even if they are spread all over the story - like they are in larger stories.

With yWriter, you can assign characters, locations, and items to scenes. novelibre copies this concept and extends it with plot lines. There's also a matrix view/editor available: ... NovelWriter has a system of tags and references that probably comes very close to your ideas.

Yes. At this moment, they are just text tags, and don't represent anything as them. For example, in one of my larger stories I have tag "todo" to mark the scenes I need to work. Generally, they could - or should be able - be just anything: character, plot line, some artefact you want to track, a place, a room - anything you feel is important enough that you want to know which scenes contain that particlular thing.

Yeah, I have looked tag implementations from various editors. I haven't yet implemented anything else but folding/unfolding feature related to tags. Someday I might want to add some sort of "tag editing view", pretty much the same way as shown in those pictures you linked :)

[mkoskim]

Ah, one thing! In MaweJS, you really don't add comments, synopses or tags to scenes or chapters. They describe the text that follows them. The reason is that scenes and chapters are far too fluid (I "recut" the text very frequently), they live and they die. Scenes are just for cutting the text to smaller pieces, and move those pieces around. Chapters are groups of scenes moving together.

[peter88213]

Perhaps you should take a look at novelWriter, where this idea is implemented very consistently. While novelibre strictly separates text and metadata on the user interface, novelWriter favours inserting everything in continuous text (comparable to code comments and docstrings in programming). Here, too, you can structure the text as you write by inserting markdown headings. The application then parses the input and creates a tree structure. However, this works on two levels: within a file and between files. Splitting an internal chapter structure into files at file system level is a separate step.

[mkoskim]

That's exactly what MaweJS does! Thanks! I take a closer look to novelWriter.