I am addressing this to the Scrivener board as the AT message boards are practically non-responsive.
Have just completed a brief trial of AT1 and was impressed enough to buy AT2.
My object was to establish a timeline spanning an interesting, active and accomplished man’s life of 70 years. I intended to use this one master data base of events, people, places, associations, etc. to draw on while writing various articles and stories.
Now, as I get into the data entry part of things I have second thoughts and need advice on which direction to pursue. With the significant investment of time sorting and entering data would it be better to simply start off with a dedicated Scrivener Project?
Hopefully there are some AT users here that can help me make a decision and move forward.
I might note I use the latest version of Scrivener and intend to keep on with it for the writing part.
If you’re not familiar with how the AT/Scrivener interaction works, it’s probably best to sync your AT timeline into a brand new Scrivener project and move forward from there.
It’s hard to say what’s best in your case. If your emphasis is on a timeline, then obviously you should lean heavily on Aeon, and perhaps start with that. Just realize that when you want to transfer things into Scrivener, they’ll come in one-dimensionally - that is, Aeon won’t know how you want them arranged in Scrivener and so will just dump all the (selected) events into the Scrivener Binder. If you anticipate that you want more structure on the Scrivener end (say, Chapters and such) it’s probably better to start there.
as the Finale Release Candidate for Aeon Timeline 2 just came out, so did the documentation. You might want to look at http://www.aeontimeline.com/support/scrivener-syncing/ to get a better understanding of the way AT2 syncing with Scrivener works and decide on the best way to proceed from there. Apart from the actual writing you can do pretty much anything from AT2. Because the meta data model of AT2 is more complex than the one of Scrivener, you need to put some thoughts into which kind of meta data you want to use in your timeline and which of these you want to have in Scrivener, if possible at all.
In case it helps, I attach my Readme document for my personal novel template, which describes how meta data has to be set up in Scrivener and in Aeon Timeline2 for my personal workflow and how these are connected for syncing. It is partly in German but the interesting parts about AT2 are in English, so you should be able to make sense of it. Readme.pdf (153 KB)