Key Words?

[janpollard@comcast.net]

Hi. I'm researching different software for novel writing. The reviews point me to Storyist, but I can't seem to find one feature I like and need: the ability to scan what I've already written about a character and/or place, etc. Scrivener has the ability to search for designated key words. Does Storyist have this? Thanks for any info.

[marguerite]

Storyist has a very fast, flexible search system that should meet your needs. Look for the magnifying glass icon in the program rather than the Apple find command. If that is not working for you, please be more specific about what you would like to find, and I'm sure Steve will try to help.

 

Usually, you just type whatever term you are looking for in the box next to the magnifying glass, and Storyist finds it, wherever it is the project.

 

And welcome to the forums, Jan.

Best,

Marguerite

[Joolissa]

I think what Jan is looking for is what Scrivener offered. The ability to add keywords to parts of your story, which is useable in many different ways. I would add different keywords for characters that were passive in the chapter, or were being talked about, or were active in the chapter. That allowed me to search for "[Character]-Passive" keyword to bring up every chapter or w/e that had a passive scene for that character. If I just searched for their name, it would bring up all scenes that the character was in, active, passive, and only talked about. There are lots of other ways it can be used as well. If that is what Jan's looking for, I don't think Storyist offers this functionality.

- Jools

[Steve E]

Hi Jan, and welcome to the forum.

Sorry I'm late to the party.

 

Yes, M and JG are correct on all points. I would add, just for the sake of clarification, that neither Search nor Find look through the contents of Comments (or the names of Bookmarks, for that matter), which would be ideal (even superior) for this particular Scrivener feature. I think JG is going to make a Feature Request for this. (If not, I will.)

 

So, how do you apply searchable tags to things in Storyist? One way is to do it in Outline View. Go to any Section in the Outline, put your cursor at the end of the line, hit return, and type whatever you like, including tags. This won't show up in your story and it is all completely searchable from the Search field. Just make sure that they are unique (something like $$Thoth-Passive$$) so Search doesn't also pull in text from the story.

 

Your tags will show up on a section's Section Sheet under Synopsis, in your outline, and on your Index cards. If you like, you can even enter them directly on your Index cards.

 

Enjoy.

- Thoth

[Joolissa]

Thanks Thoth. Adding them to the comments was exactly what I was going to suggest, but then found out there isn't a collection of comments and you can't search them, so I put it as a question in this forum and then Steve moved it over to feature requests. He says that it is on the list.

 

I'm glad you suggested a way. I couldn't think of another way than the comments. I suppose you could use bookmarks as well, but that'd be a lot of bookmarks.

 

Would wiki linking work? Or character points? You can assign section sheets to characters. I'm going to feature request it for Settings. But collaging also might work, you can collage a section and character together and a section and a setting. If you collaged every chapter a character was in to that character sheet, you'd have quick access to every section that character appeared it. That would be harder for things like "Hint about future trouble" type keywords, though.

 

- Jools.

[Steve E]

Would wiki linking work?

You could make wiki links invisible in the story text using [[some-tag|]] but Search would only point you to the Notebook entry the link creates. You could then link from the note page back to the top of a section by dragging the section name in the Project View (under Manuscripts) to the displayed note. You might also add some explanatory text and a unique tag name.

 

If you create the note yourself, or have already created it, the wiki-link in the story text seems unnecessary to me. All you really need is a single Notebook page containing your unique tag names, each with a wiki-link to the appropriate section. E.g., In the note include the line: Thoth-Passive Thoth is passive in Section Jools. Jools. The "Jools" is the link to the section. But I have to wonder if you even need a link back to the section since all you need to know is that Thoth is passive in it and Search will find all the Thoth-Passive tags in your note with the appropriate sections named.

 

Your other idea, to use Character Points, could also work.

 

I'm a little foggy on your collage idea. Could you explain further? Is it that you want a note for each tag, and to add a particular note to multiple Section collages? Interesting.

 

I think putting the Thoth-Passive comment on the Section sheet, outline or Index card is both simpler and searchable.

- Thoth

[Joolissa]

A collage would work just to associate a section with a character or setting. Drag what ever section contains that character to the collage of that character/setting sheet (though since you can do it and have a note with it in Character development points, the only real reason to do it would be the Setting Sheets, since they don't have a "development point" field. I put that in feature requests though).

 

That way, you could click on a character/setting, put it in collage view, and see which sections it appears in. Not the best way to do it, but atleast one way of achieving something similar.

 

Personally I prefer the character points way, since it offers a per point note (which you could type in "Passive" "Active" etc.), but that won't currently work for settings and there's isn't a default option for props (but you could do a work around collection with character sheets for that).

- Jools.

[Steve E]

Thanks Jools.

Something to think about.

- Thoth.

[marguerite]

Couldn't you also set up a custom field? If, in your character description, you set up one or more text fields called Keyword, and entered "passive," wouldn't you be able to search Storyist for that word?

 

You can set up a sheet once and then use it as a template (see the user guide for details). So I think Storyist may already have this functionality, just not under the same name.

Best,

M

[Joolissa]

Your example might work if you're trying to assign a keyword to a specific character or two, say you want to label three characters "Blue", you could use a custom field for that, but if you want the keyword to reference a specific section it gets harder. Keywords linked to a section allow the user to quickly find all sections the keyword refers to.

 

A better example would be that you want to label all sections that contain a specific item, say the One Ring. Sure you could search for the term "ring", but what if no one calls it a ring? What if it is referred to as "it" in a lot of conversation because you can't mention it. If you search for "it" you're going to get a lot more results. You could call it "It", but you'll still get a lot of extraneous results and you wouldn't get results where it is also called Ring.

 

Now, that's all implying that Scrivener keywords bring you right to the sentence where the person is, but that isn't true, it shows you the chapters or w/e that you assign the keyword to and then you can look in there for it. So the equivalent would be that Storyist would show you the sections that you assigned the keyword to.

 

Here's a screen shot of the Scrivener keywords to show you how it works. I appologize for the crappy quality, I saved it too low. Lemme know if you can't read it and I'll do it over.

click for 100% view

 

As to achieving that type of functionality in Storyist, I think the easiest way is to create custom collections and use Character Development Points to assign the sections that contain what the keyword contains. That way, you have a clickable list of the sections the keyword refers to and you have the note for each point as well, in which you could (to continue with my first example) write "passive" "mentioned" "active" etc. etc. I suppose you could also use a collection of Notes instead of a Character sheet and use Wiki Links instead of development points.

- Jools

[Steve E]

I suppose you could also use a collection of Notes instead of a Character sheet and use Wiki Links instead of development points.

- Jools

Or just one big note with a list of wiki-links, each with an appended comment. Search would highlight each of them (in turn) based on your search criteria.

 

I think Steve might want to look into this. Everything Scrivener can do, Storyist needs to do better and easier, or prove that it doesn't need to be done at all.

- Thoth.

[Joolissa]

Everything Scrivener can do, Storyist needs to do better and easier, or prove that it doesn't need to be done at all.

- Thoth.

 

I agree!

- Jools