I am trying to get started with Connected Text.

One thing I notice right away is that when I am writing in CT it appears there is no word wrap. In other words I am typing one great big long line. When I go into view mode what I have written wraps.

Is there a way to have word wrap in the edit mode? If there isn't, I cannot imagine myself writing if I am unable to scan over what I have written.

Also, is there any way to dock all the various windows?

Thanks.

Daly

Not to worry - I found the menu option which gives me word wrap.

And I think I have partly solved the docking problem.

I began by setting up a personal project with the main topics: Fitness, Meditation, Personal Journal, Photography, and with subtopics.

I'm going to play around with adding information, and see how it goes.

When I feel more confident, I'll set up a work project. I think I see how one project really can consist of many projects.

Daly

Daly de Gagne wrote:

I am trying to get started with Connected Text.

One thing I notice right away is that
when I am writing in CT it appears there is no word wrap. In other words I am typing one
great big long line. When I go into view mode what I have written wraps.

Is there a way
to have word wrap in the edit mode? If there isn't, I cannot imagine myself writing if I
am unable to scan over what I have written.

Also, is there any way to dock all the
various windows?

Thanks.

Daly

If you haven't already done so, it might also be a good idea to sign up for the ConnectedText forum and just browse through the past posts and monitor the new ones as they come in. One can learn a lot from just simply trying out stuff (often codes posted) that other users are talking about.

Thanks, Dr Andus.

I have done as you suggested and joined the forum.

I am taking some timid steps.

This weekend I hope to download Glen's academic plug-in and see if I can get the hang of integrating it into my project.

Essentially what I want to do is to have authors and info related to them, and then have quotes from my various authors arranged as to themes - but am unsure how to set up the links so everything is most easily accessible. Am thinking categories might be best way to deal with the themes - or not.

If I use categories am thinking to have the word theme in each category or simply a T, in case for other reasons I want to use the word denoting the theme for a category unrelated to quotes.

I do feel overwhelmed by all the info a/b CT - and though I realize much work has gone into creating the help info still feel there's something lacking for ppl like me who seem not to have a natural understanding of how wikis work or possibilities they offer.

This weekend I plan to spend a couple of hours doing nothing other than exploring CT.

Any help or suggestions you or others can offer is much appreciated.

Daly



Dr Andus wrote:

If you haven't already done so, it might also be a good idea to sign up for the
ConnectedText forum and just browse through the past posts and monitor the new ones as
they come in. One can learn a lot from just simply trying out stuff (often codes posted)
that other users are talking about.

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Essentially what I want to do is
to have authors and info related to them, and then have quotes from my various authors
arranged as to themes - but am unsure how to set up the links so everything is most easily
accessible. Am thinking categories might be best way to deal with the themes - or
not.

There might be more people on the CT forum who could advise you on this, in case you want to repost your question there. I'm just a beginner, so I'd use Categories for what you describe: categories for the authors and the various themes. I'm aware that there are also Properties and Attributes, but I didn't have to use them yet.

If I use categories am thinking to have the word theme in each category or simply
a T, in case for other reasons I want to use the word denoting the theme for a category
unrelated to quotes.

I wonder if that's necessary, given the various features in the Category pane. The tree view for example allows you to build a hierarchy of categories, which is a way of grouping them. And then for displaying the topics in the given categories, you have the option to look for Union (all topics with all the categories selected) or Intersection (topics that must have all categories selected). Also, you can rename categories later, and add as many categories to a topic as you like. So you may not need to mark the theme categories with a T.

I do feel overwhelmed by all the info a/b CT - and though I
realize much work has gone into creating the help info still feel there's something
lacking for ppl like me who seem not to have a natural understanding of how wikis work or
possibilities they offer.

This weekend I plan to spend a couple of hours doing
nothing other than exploring CT.

Any help or suggestions you or others can offer is
much appreciated.

If you haven't done this yet, I found it helpful to go through every single command in the pull-down menus and see what they do. Especially the View one seemed important, as it contains all the main tools of the software, which allow you to construct your own workspace and workflow. Only after I understood these could I begin to come up with the arrangement that particularly suited the task I wanted to use CT for. You can actually save your optimal desktop arrangement, so it's preserved (in fact you can save several desktop versions). It all depends on what you want to do with it, how big your monitor is, and how many monitors you are using.

For example, I have Table of Contents docked on the left, so I can always see the outline of the document I'm working on. If I'm annotating, I have the Notes pane docked to the right. If I'm adding categories to my topics, I may have the Categories and the Topics panes docked on the right next to each other. The topic's window is in the middle. I usually have the Navigator window open on a second monitor to my right, as it helps me visualise the hierarchical relationship between various topics that I linked together.

Daly,

I still am a bit of a novice myself, so this advice might not be what you would get from one of the pros on the Forum, but here's what I would do:

First of all, I would use Category for AUTHOR or QUOTE and not for the theme. This way, CT will create a nice indexed page for both those types of topics.

Next, I would use attributes to designate the theme and the author within the quotes. So your quote topics will like like this:

[[$CATEGORY:Quote]]
The idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even?ultimately, God willing, one day?that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.

Author: [[AUTHOR:=Wolfe, Tom]]\\
Theme: [[THEME:=Bravery]]


Note that the author attribute is exactly the same as the title for the topic of the author in question. This is important because it will then automatically add a list of topics that have that author as an attribute into the author topic.

Your author topics will look like this:

[[$CATEGORY:Author]]
**Web sites**:\\
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wolfe

**Bio**:\\
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. (born March 2, 1931)[1] is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Here are some screen captures of what the finished results will look like:

See here for what one of the quote topics will look like in View mode: http://db.tt/WZcRL9HL
See here for what one of the author topics will look like in View mode: http://db.tt/q1Khc2p2
See here for a screen shot of what the topic Author will look like: http://db.tt/8hVww29X

Of course, this is all just one way to do this.

Steve Z.

Oops. I mixed up identifying a couple of those screen shots. Here's a correction:

See here for what the topic Author will look like in View mode: http://db.tt/q1Khc2p2
See here for a screen shot of what the topic Wolfe, Tom will look like: http://db.tt/8hVww29X

FWIW, I just put together a blog posting that, I hope, explains a little better the approach to building this simple quotation database in ConnectedText. You can find the posting here: http://wp.me/pa4lV-he

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

FWIW, I just put together a blog posting that, I hope, explains a little better the
approach to building this simple quotation database in ConnectedText. You can find
the posting here: http://wp.me/pa4lV-he

Thanks for the helpful blog post, it did clarify some things for me. Though I'm still having trouble figuring out what exactly I can use properties and attributes for within my current project, as so far categories did the job for me. It seems to me that to use properties/attributes one needs to have a reasonably clear idea of the kind of database one wants to build. But as I'm using CT for analysing texts (breaking them up into smaller chunks based on content, annotating them with headers, linking them to each other), it is only towards the end that it becomes clear to me what categories I should be using, and up until now I haven't found a use for properties/attributes, even though I'm itching to figure them out and make use of them somehow.

One of the features I like about Tinderbox is the ease with which I can use Stamps to retrospectively add/change attributes as structure emerges or shifts in my growing database. I'm just starting to use ConnectedText and am the rawest of newbies, but I hope that there are similar features that make it easy to plop information into CT and later define attributes/properties/connections as I recognize or adjust them.

Manfred Kuhn has a few posts about how he uses attributes and properties, especially this one where he writes about trying to get CT to replicate some of the function of the old program Lotus Agenda:

http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2011/09/agenda-and-connectedtext-iv.html

I agree that properties and attributes will only serve you if you have a clear idea of what you need in your database. I am building a database of the books published and sold by the nonprofit organization I work for. Attributes are useful for designating the audience, price, product number, and ISBN for each of those books.

Steve

And as a quick follow up, I'm not suggesting that ConnectedText is the best choice if you need that kind of "field" data. A real database probably is. But attributes and properties can extend the use of CT in a lot of cases.

Steve Z.

Steve,

thanks for Manfred's link. I've come across it in the past but after reading your post it suddenly makes more sense. I guess the trouble with getting my head around Attributes is that it is such a flexible feature that I need to see some concrete examples before it begins to make sense.

If I were CT's developer, I'd hire you to write 10 basic tutorials for me like your two blog posts and I'd link them from the CT homepage :) It seems to be a common enough complaint from non-techie, non-programmer humanities-types like me that it is difficult to get an initial understanding of what CT can do and how to get started with it, as the CT help file is just a bit too advanced in its language and explanation. Even though after the initial hurdle CT is surprisingly easy to use even for a beginner (which I still am). Yet I think that a lot of non-programmer, humanities-types would get very excited about CT once they understand it, just like they tend to do when they discover Scrivener.

Dr Andus wrote:

Steve,
If I were CT's developer, I'd hire you to
write 10 basic tutorials for me like your two blog posts and I'd link them from the CT
homepage :)

By which I meant to say, you are really good at explaining this sort thing! I really enjoy reading your software reviews.

And just an anecdote to back up my point. A few days ago I emailed a friend of mine (another humanities-type person and a Scrivener user) the link to CT's home page, recommending it and saying how I switched from Scrivener to CT. His response was: "Blimey, and I thought Scrivener was difficult to figure out..."

I realise that Eduardo's challenge is to find a balance between showing off the power of CT on the home page, yet at the same time offer an easy way in, so as not to frighten away the non-programming, non-techie types. There is indeed a link to the Welcome project, but I think a more basic set of tutorials is needed still.

Thank you for the nice comments, Dr Andus.

S

Dr Andus wrote:

I guess the trouble with getting my head around
Attributes is that it is such a flexible feature that I need to see some concrete
examples before it begins to make sense.

Here's a concrete example that just occurred to me (by which I'm not implying that it hasn't occurred to many others before):

I've got a project (CT-speak for database) for my contacts. I've been struggling with how to include correspondence, whether to just append e-mail and phone conversation notes to the topic for individual contacts or to add new topics for each communication. I think our discussion of attributes helped me decide on the latter approach. Here's how it works --

I've created a template for "correspondence." It has just two lines of code:

[[$CATEGORY: correspondence ]]\\
From: [[From:= contact's name]]

When I create a new topic for a communication, I start the title with the date and then add the contact's name. Then I put the contact's name in the "From" attribute, being sure to duplicate the way that contact's main topic is named. This will then add any link's with the From attribute for a specific contact to that contact's main topic, as demonstrated in this screen capture:

http://db.tt/5pDhPnAu

Simple but very useful.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Here's a concrete example that just occurred to me (by which
I'm not implying that it hasn't occurred to many others before):

I've got a project
(CT-speak for database) for my contacts. I've been struggling with how to include
correspondence, whether to just append e-mail and phone conversation notes to the
topic for individual contacts or to add new topics for each communication. I think our
discussion of attributes helped me decide on the latter approach. Here's how it works
--

I've created a template for "correspondence." It has just two lines of
code:

[[$CATEGORY: correspondence ]]\\
From: [[From:= contact's name]]

When
I create a new topic for a communication, I start the title with the date and then add the
contact's name. Then I put the contact's name in the "From" attribute, being sure to
duplicate the way that contact's main topic is named. This will then add any link's
with the From attribute for a specific contact to that contact's main topic, as
demonstrated in this screen capture:

http://db.tt/5pDhPnAu

Thanks, Steve, very helpful, as usual.

Steve and Dr Andus, thank you so much for the time you each took to help me understand Connected Text. I've been trying to work with CT, and your instruction was very much part of it. However, after spending many hours, I hate to say that somehow I'm not putting it all together so it can work for me. Having said that, I am convinced still that the problem is *not* the software, but my own way of understanding.

For anyone who less obtuse than myself when it comes to CT, I have no doubt they'll find it an excellent and flexible program.

Thanks again.

Daly

Dr Andus wrote:

Steve,

It seems to be a common enough complaint from non-techie, non-programmer
humanities-types like me that it is difficult to get an initial
understanding of what CT can do and how to get started with it, as the
CT help file is just a bit too advanced in its language and explanation.
Even though after the initial hurdle CT is surprisingly easy to use even
for a beginner (which I still am). Yet I think that a lot of
non-programmer, humanities-types would get very excited about CT once
they understand it, just like they tend to do when they discover
Scrivener.

Right on the money. Good CT tutorials are few, hard to find.