I’m looking for a way to view my notes in two different ways simultaneously, as an outline and spread out on a map where different notes can be connected in various ways.
The first one I do in Scrivener, obviously, the second can be done in Scapple. The notes can be imported and exported between the two programs, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to keep them in both.
Tinderbox offers this functionality, but I feel like the combination of Scrivener and Scapple could be capable of this, too.
Have you looked at Scrivener’s free form corkboard? (View -> Corkboard Options -> Freeform)
The obstacle to linking notes between Scapple and Scrivener is that the two deal with very different atomic objects. A “note” in Scapple is just a block of text with specific map coordinates. A “note” in Scrivener has a title, a synopsis, body text, and a specific location in the Binder. Connecting the two in a robust way that won’t break in either program no matter what the other program does is fairly challenging.
Katherine
Would it be possible (theoretically, in a future version) for Scapple to handle Scrivener notes and just leave the fields it can’t handle alone?
I’m using the corkboard right now, but to be honest, I don’t really trust it, because it’s not independent of the story’s structure. For example, when I put some notes (be they chapters or characters) in a folder in the outline, they are moved to a stack on the corkboard. Also, it doesn’t allow for connecting different notes like Scapple does with lines/arrows and background shapes, which becomes very useful once the project reaches a certain size.