I also added a note to act as a toggle, to control a user attribute in the me note, $ShowIncludes. The result is much neater, with all the structured notes tucked away inside their two containers. I then created another note to contain the Storyspace writing spaces, selected those in the Storyspace version of the document, copied and pasted them into their container. I opened the latter in Tinderbox 7, created a note which was to become the container for the Composite notes, and moved them into that. My intention is to provide two modes of progression from the title page: one to take Storyspace users through to the chain of included text writing spaces, the other to take Tinderbox users through to the nested chain of Composite notes. In any case, I am strongly in favour of user choice, so would prefer to give the user control over how the text and pictures are presented to them. Initially I wondered if it would be possible to determine which app the document was running, but there doesn’t seem to be an accessible attribute for that. My starting point was the last two versions of this document, one using included text to work well in Storyspace, the other using new Composite notes to work well in Tinderbox.įrom those, I wanted to produce one document which would use just one copy of the text and pictures, but offer the reader a choice as to how they are presented. This article rises to the challenge of creating a single document – with just one copy of the content – which delivers parallel text to both Storyspace and Tinderbox 7 users. Although they share a common file format, as we have seen in my documents containing Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 1, creating a document in one doesn’t mean that it is necessarily that usable in the other. What’s nice about technology and the tools that software offers is that even with manuals and thick text of instructions, a user can always maneuver within the simplest form that suits his own needs, knowing that should more arenas of possibility open up, the field is there.Tinderbox and Storyspace are different, and serve completely different purposes. Even though I don’t know if this is going to in fact be a hypertext work, the concept of having it take shape in a more cohesive manner than pages of scribbled notes (I’ve never been an outline person, except to make the required one for teachers’ purposes after a story or essay was finished) is something that at this stage of my life offers invaluable assistance in saving time alone. I’ve been fiddling around with several projects in Tinderbox, starting from placing a few short hypertext stories into a project space and from there transferring a much larger Storyspace piece into the medium, and progressing to a new project for a longer novel to make use of the research and note-making spaces that would act as an outline or rough plotting structure for the narrative. Tinderbox offers a world more of capabilities and the visuals of mapping and layout are more open and yet precise in the graphics. That said, when I fell in love with Storyspace as a means to write hypertext story, it was a pita to relearn and rewrite into Tinderbox even though the two are very similar in many ways in the processing and theory of linking. But I’m also hampered by a stubborn resistance to change. Instructions are held aside and come into play when a need arises that can’t be figured out by clicking buttons, turning screws, guessing, or the real motive of comprehension as to how something would logically work. Learning for me has always been easiest in the doing.
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