Chapter 6

Notes

Notes are for the scraps that don’t belong anywhere yet: ideas, web pages, pictures, research PDFs and documents, kept with the book they’re for.

The Notes grid

Notes shows every note as a card in a grid, the most recently changed first. Each card has the note’s kind and title, a preview, and the day it last changed (“Today”, “Yesterday”, or a date). The preview depends on the kind of note:

The first pages of PDFs and Word documents come from the Mac’s own previews. If the Mac can’t draw one, the card shows a large icon instead.

In a series, each book has notes of its own; only the Story Bible is shared.

Filtering and searching

The sidebar lists the kinds of note, each with how many there are: All Notes, Text, Links, Pictures, PDFs and Word. Click one to show only notes of that kind.

To search, type in the Search notes box at the top of the sidebar, or press ⌘F while you’re in Notes to go to it. The grid shows, as you type, the notes whose title, opening lines or web address contain what you’ve typed, with capitals not mattering. The search works within the kind you’ve chosen. Pictures, PDFs and Word documents are found by their titles, which come from their file names.

Clicking a kind, or typing in the search box, takes you back to the grid from any note you have open.

Adding notes

Click + at the top of the Notes sidebar for its menu:

Text notes

Type the note’s title and press ↩ or click Create Note; Cancel or Esc closes the form. The note opens in the editor with its title as a heading, and you write it as you would a scene, with italics, bold and everything else the editor offers.

Links

The New Link form has three fields:

Click Add Link or press ↩. The link appears in the grid.

Pictures, PDFs and documents

Choose Add Pictures, PDFs or Documents… and pick the files, or drag them from Finder onto the Notes grid. You can add several at once. Septangular copies each file into the book’s notes folder, so it travels with the book; the file you added from stays where it was.

A note’s title comes from its file’s name: a file called Headland photo.png becomes the note “Headland photo”. Files of any other kind can’t be notes, and Septangular says so.

Opening notes

Click a card to open its note:

To go back to the grid from a note, click the arrow at the left of its header.

A link’s web address is written at the top of its note, before its heading, between two lines of three hyphens: url: https://…. To change the address, edit that line, and save.

Changes to text notes and links are unsaved until you save the book with File → Save ⌘S, just like changes to scenes. Notes are never part of a built book.

The card menu

Right-click a card, or click its ⋯, for its menu. Which commands it has depends on the kind of note:

Turning a note into a Story Bible entry

When a note turns out to be about a character, a place or a thing, it can become a Story Bible entry. Right-click a text note or a link, choose Turn into Story Bible Entry, and then the category: one of the Story Bible’s own, or while it has none, Characters, Places or Things.

The note’s title becomes the entry’s name, and its text becomes the entry. A link keeps its web address as a line of the entry, starting “Link:”. The note leaves Notes, and the status bar says where it went; you’ll find the entry in the Story Bible under the category you chose (Chapter 5).

Septangular saves the book first, so the note’s latest text goes with it. That’s an ordinary save: a version in Versions, which also carries out any deletes waiting in the Stash.

Pictures, PDFs and Word documents can’t become entries.

Where notes are kept

Notes are files in the book’s notes folder, all together, with no folders inside it. A text note is a plain text file whose first line is its title, written # Title; a link is the same with its address at the top. Pictures, PDFs and Word documents are kept as the files they are.

• New notes’ files are named after their titles, in lowercase with hyphens, with a number added if the name is taken: storm-timing.md, storm-timing-2.md.
• Text files added as .txt or .markdown, and rich text, are kept as .md.
• A text note with no # heading takes its title from its first line.

Adding, deleting and converting notes happen in the folder straight away; Versions records them at your next save, so a deleted note is in the Trash and in Versions. Find in History… can bring a deleted note back (Chapter 8). You can also put files into the notes folder from Finder yourself, and Septangular lists them. Appendix C describes the rest of the book’s folder.

Notes or the Story Bible?

Both hold what you know about the story, but they’re kept differently:

A note can always move to the Story Bible later, with Turn into Story Bible Entry.