There are to two methods for entering text in Research, what I’ll call 2 “views”:
VIEW 1: If I highlight “Research” I see the corkboard. I press CTL-N, and I get a blank page to enter text. I can title it if I want, and I enter text.
VIEW 2: When the corkboard is visible, I click on the corkboard, and press CTL-N, I get a posty-note to enter text, and title if I want.
If I enter text via VIEW 1, it doesn’t show up automatically in VIEW 2, and vice versa. Any Title changes WILL show up in each view, just not the text.
After playing around, I realize that if I click the “Auto Populate Synopsis” box on EACH note, it will put in the text. This is NOT an intuitive function in the Research section (although it might be in the Draft section). Perhaps default to Auto Populate Synopsis in the Research section?
Alright, I’m going to try to word this right, and am not guaranteeing that you will understand it.
On the Corkboard view you see a sequencing of cards. These cards show the title of each individual sub-document, and a small synopsis. This synopsis does not have to match the internal text at all. Most of mine say things like “the scene with the tigers” or “final battle on National Mall” so that I know what they are without going into each one. These little synopsis blurbs do not compile in the main document, or even count towards word counts, they are just notes for you. Cards do not HAVE to have a synopsis, they can be left blank.
To change the actual text of the sub-document indicated by a card, you would select the Text view from the toolbar to open the word processor window with the actual text inside of it.
The Auto-Populate Synopsis does perform the convenience of pulling data into your synopsis for you. You can hit it at any point after text has been placed into the document. If you want specific text in the synopsis, you can highlight it in the Text view and then hit the Auto-Populate button to pull it over.
So the two views are not supposed to be concretely linked. I have found once you get used to this, it is quite intuitive. I often create a scene in Corkboard view, with a title and small synopsis, long before I go back and fill in the document itself in the Text view.