I got everything lined up by snapping the cards to the grid, but I found that as soon as I resized the cards, they no longer lined up. Even when I tried to reproduce the original size, the grid was no longer usable unless I moved each card to it, individually. In the above screenshot, you’ll see that I can no longer move any cards without them snapping to the new, wrong grid.
Am I missing something?
As a suggestion, if the grid is resized when the cards are resized, this problem would be eliminated.
I don’t think you’re missing anything. This is why I don’t use the freeform corkboard, much. I prefer to set up stacked corkboards—you can drag a card from one column/row to another, letting them automagically rearrange themselves, and resizing is never a problem. (See below for a 4-act Save the Cat example. I prefer to split the double-long “third act” into two at the midpoint.)
OTOH, I think your suggestion is a great one and wish you good fortune in having it implemented!
While that is the solution, I can think of too many problems with that approach, mostly all on account of how this is a universal setting in a situation where every project can have its own pair of individual slider settings. It would be a mistake to conflate the slider as exclusively being a “zoom” tool because that’s only one way of using it. Perhaps it makes sense to think of it as such in Freeform, but outside of that it’s more of a preference. I want cards to be this big, because I type a lot into them, or that small because I don’t at all.
And if you think of it that way, one might end up with a mosquito net of a grid in one project and a garden trellis is another, simply because of your preferred card size.
Hmm, the only thing I can think of that might reconcile the differences is to ditch using a fixed unit of measurement for the grid size, and instead have it based more abstractly on a fraction of the card size (whatever that is). Doing so would also reconcile the current situation where only the top and left edges necessarily fit within the grid. It would probably mean having to ditch the concept of having non-square grids though, which might make some people unhappy—otherwise the aspect ratio slider would be too weird.
And it wouldn’t solve every problem—you’d still have mosquito nets and trellises at the extremes. So I’m not sure if it’s a good solution at that.
I see the problem of mosquito nets v. trellises as much less annoying than the current system which forces the user to re-align all the cards if they are resized. This is precisely the reason I avoid the freeform corkboard. I size the cards down to see my entire layout with just the titles visible, and then size them up to be able to see the details of my synopses. Realignment is a pain.
Perhaps the analogy to physical index cards can be taken too far. If I have a physical deck of index cards, resizing doesn’t happen unless I get a deck of differently sized cards and copy the info onto the new cards. But in Scriv’s virtual index card deck, resizing can happen a lot. (Personally, I organise even physical cards into nice neat rows. The chaos I see in some of L&L’s freeform corkboard illustrations would drive me bonkers and I’d spend hours getting rid of it.)
The question here is that if a user wants snap-to-grid, does that user want to maintain relative card sizes and positions as the board zooms up or down, or would they rather have the cards change size while the board stays fixed? My preference is for the former, and to heck with absolute grid size, but that’s me. I’d love to hear other users’ preferences.
Now that’s a thought. This kind of usage could be supported by another approach: the concept of “100%” is introduced to the slider, by use of a digital “detent”. If you move the slider off of that point then snap-to-grid temporarily disables (the grid vanishes to reinforce this) and doesn’t return until you bring it back to 100%. Now the grid size is applicable at the only point where it makes sense to be applicable, when the card sizes match it. Those that use the slider like an overview tool instead of a hard setting can do so and realignment is never an issue because at 100% the grid lines join up precisely where they were against the cards from the start. And as for establishing what 100% is, that could simply be set when you turn snap-to-grid on, giving you a way to reset it as well if you want.
The main downside of that approach is that it might end up getting reported as a bug repeatedly. It’s not terribly intuitive to anyone used to illustration style programs where canvas scale isn’t something you’d change because you want the card size larger until the end of time.
I might not be understanding this correctly. So each card would change its size from the top-left corner, which would remain fixed to an x,y coordinate on the board? Not sure about that to be honest—that sounds really messy for anyone that isn’t a snap-to-grid person. It’s moving the problem around rather than solving it: freeform works better if you have snap to grid turned on but is a mess if you don’t (and even there it has its limits, I presume at some point the cards will overlap and become difficult to work with, even with a grid).
Yeah, I usually avoid the freeform, too. I like to play with it at the very early stages of plotting and use it almost like a bar chart to see the sizes of the different sections.
A trick I’ve found is to simply make note of the grid size, card size, and card aspect ratio, and be sure not to move any cards without setting those appropriately.
