Index cards snap-to-grid

Scrivener Wish List
1

Hi

After the multiple-storyline thread I’m slightly nervous about suggesting this, and I notice another user suggested it but had no reply, so here goes…

Back in the 1.0 days I was an advocate of un-anchoring the index cards and so was pleased to see the freeform mode appear in 2.0 – except I never actually use it. It is just a bit too unstructured for me, and I would like the snap-to-grid type functionality you see in most graphical layout software.

So just an option in the freeform mode where things neatly line up on top of/alongside each other.

My particular use case is a bit like the multiple-storyline thread, in that I want in the planning stage to be able to lay things out by story thread or sub-plot, so that I can have something like this:

 Plot A          Plot B          Plot C
 ------          ------          ------ 
Event A1
Event A2
               Event B1
Event A3
Event A4
                               Event C1
               Event B2
Event A5
Event A6
Event A7
               Event B3

I find that easier to follow than the colour-coded outline view.

Also, I’m in the middle of a rewrite. What I can’t do very well in the outline view, and what I would be able to do in a card view like above, is to have some new cards in the columns over to the right that I want to add to my story, or replace existing ones, and I could mouse up and down and drag and drop them where I want them to go in some what-if scenario planning.

For that to work, the snap-to-grid “freeform” view would need the ability to insert and delete whole rows as it were. That is, I want to insert a new event in my A column after event A2, then it should bump down everything in all of the columns to make space for it. Likewise, when I no longer want A6 it should nudge up A7 and B3 etc…

I would never dare to suggest anything is easy, but at least this would not have any implications for the binder. Ermm. Would it?

Thanks Keith.

2

It wouldn’t have any implications for the binder, no. I have no objections to anything like this, although it would be time-consuming to implement so won’t be something I can just throw together. Let me consider it for 3.0 (no promises, as always!).

All the best,
Keith

3

Can’t say fairer than that, thanks.

4

“Implications”, I meant, not “implementations”, obviously. :slight_smile: I should add that I quite like this idea and it would be useful, so it’s got a good chance of making it in, it’s just a pretty big job.

All the best,
Keith

5

I think this is a fantastic idea.

It marries the usefulness of being able to visualise multiple story-threads, with the concept that re-ordering the cards will also affect the order of the parts in the binder.

I’ll be very happy if this gets into a future version.

6

But this wouldn’t affect the order of the parts in the binder because it would be part of the freeform mode…

7

Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t want it to affect the binder, I’d be worried that my what-if playing around would cock up what I already have which would inhibit my use of it.

I’d be more than happy to manually update the binder once I have something I’ve settled on in the snap-to-grid freeform mode…

8

I think this kind of thing would finally make the free-form cork board useful to me! Glad to know it’s in the long-term plan. Would the grid allow for overlapping cards, so that it would be easy to make a set of them cascade?

9

No, I wouldn’t have thought so - overlapping, cascading cards would make a grid very difficult to work with. Sorry!

All the best,
Keith

10

Oh come now, Kieth! Where’s that Cornwallish (Cornwally? Cornwallian?) can-do spirit!? :wink: I’m sure it would be a snap (pun intended) to implement a set of options (snap-to-size: 1x1 grid, 2x2 grid, size of card grid…). After all, if one thing’s hard to do, then making two hard things is easy (assuming “hard” is negative or ‘False’ in the logical sense).

Ha! Let’s see you get out of it now! :stuck_out_tongue:

In all seriousness, I can see that kind of optional grid-size being a big headache, but it would be nice to have vertical “lanes” where just the title and maybe first line or so was visible on each card. Of course, for it to be really useful, clicking on a card would only temporarily reveal the whole card, so that in it’s default state, non of the titles would be obscured. [sarcasm]See, that wouldn’t be hard at all.[/sarcasm]