Because that would also flatten any structure in the binder! Users who had set up subdocuments of subdocuments would destroy all of their binder structure without realising it as soon as they started moving things around in the plot-line view.
No, but the other difference is that the corkboard only shows you the top-level subdocuments of the selected folder. It is not capable of showing you the entire manuscript. Did you even read my reply to Mr Bill? It would be entirely possible to create something like this that only showed the contents of a single folder, but I doubt anyone would want that - are you suggesting that you only want to show the plot line for one chapter at a time, and not the whole thing together?
Talking of Writers’ Café, try moving things around in its little outline view, and see how messed up the arrangement of cards soon gets. Even Writers’ Café, a program dedicated to this sort of view, cannot translate a very simple outline to a plot-line arrangement without unexpected behaviour, because the two modes are incompatible - just imagine what would happen with a complicated binder structure in Scrivener!
Sorry, but it seems to me that you just aren’t grasping the real issues here - the issue isn’t how such a view would work in itself, but what would happen to the corresponding document in the binder when you moved something in this view and vice versa. And it’s not enough to think about only a simple binder structure - you need to consider a very complicated structure, because otherwise it solves nothing.
To make it easier for those interested to see the issues, here, consider this binder structure in the Draft folder:
As you can see, there are text documents within text documents, folders within text documents and so on, and some of the documents have been assigned a label (which we will say is PoV here), others haven’t.
Let’s look at the labels (PoV tracks):
If you would like to continue this discussion, please try working with this structure and these PoV labels in mind as a starting point. First, try mapping the structure onto a Story Lines-esque plot line view. You would end up with five tracks:
Bob
Jason
Sally
Margaret
Ideas
But wait, there’s also the “No Label” track - anything not assigned a PoV would also need to go into this plot-line, because if it exists in the binder it has to exist here, too, otherwise how can moving things around here have any effect? If not all documents are shown on the plot-line view, when you move things around, scrivener would have no idea where they go.
But hang on - do we really want all those “Notes” and “Ideas” documents in the plot-line view? Won’t that be really annoying if you’re just trying to work out the plot-line? All of those documents will get in the way, but there’s no way around it because if they’re not there you’re only showing partial data, and you can’t map partial data back onto full data, at least not without what will seem unexpected results to the user. And it’s no good saying that you shouldn’t have all these notes documents in the binder if you want to work like this, because any putative plot-line view would have to work for all use cases, not just the use cases of those users proposing the thing.
Also, remember that the folders all have to be included in the plot-line, too, because they are part of the structure and, besides, in Scrivener there is no difference between a folder and a text document other than its icon.
But, anyway, try mapping all of this out on a plot-line view. Then, imagine moving things in the plot-line view, and try to work out where the movement would now place the scene in the binder.
Then, go the other way. Imagine moving one of the scenes or documents in the binder - where does that place things in the plot-line view?
Make sure you try it out with moving all sorts of scenes in both views - chapters, scenes, beats, notes and so on. Also, be sure to think about what would happen if you add a new document in either view. And a new folder. And also consider what would happen if you moved, some documents inside another document - e.g. moving “Beat B” inside “Beat A” in the binder. And also, what would happen if you group some documents - say you select several scenes and used Documents > Group. And also what happens if you Ungroup some scenes (say selecting Chapter 1 and going to Documents > Ungroup). What happens i the plot-line then? And be sure to think about all of this stuff going the other way, too - do all of these things on your plot-line view and think about what happens in the binder, and how things get arranged on the plot-line too. (You will need to draw out your plot-line and have a pencil and eraser handy. )
And, of course, try out deleting documents from both views.
Also, move documents from lane to lane in the plot-line view (which would presumably change the label, but may also move the document).
Now, once you’ve done all of this, throw this into the mix: what if I’m starting in medias res? My Chapter 1 actually occurs halfway through the story. Or what if, like in Spin or Holes, my chapters alternate between chapters set in the past and chapters in the present? To make that possible, my plot-line would have to be divorced entirely from the binder, with movements inside it having no effect on my binder, because presumably I’d want my plot-line chronological but my binder non-chronological. Hmm, but this would only be useful for some writers - it wouldn’t be so good for others writing chronologically. Argh, which way to go? Whichever you choose, some users won’t be happy. If the plot-line is supposed to affect the binder, you run into all the issues above - it can’t really be mapped onto the binder anyway; and if it doesn’t affect the binder, how useful is it, really?
So, as I say, if you really want to spend some time thinking about this, start with the image of the binder structure above, draw it out on a plot-line view, and then move something in one and work out where it would go in the other. Test out what would happen when you move documents inside other documents and out again, add new documents, delete documents, group documents and so on. You’ll soon find you run into some serious problems - but also bear in mind that you might be able to decide where such-and-such should go because you are human (I hope!) and so can make some choices based on information not available to a computer. The computer has no idea what is a chapter and what is not, what is a scene and what is not - it just sees text documents, folders and labels. So you need to think like the computer thinks in all of this, making decisions only on the information available and not on knowledge you bring yourself.
Have fun!
All the best,
Keith