Thank you all for your input so far! You make me realize the scope for authoring-tools is wider than I considered, dealing with everything from brain storming, entering content, editing, filtering, assembling, ordering and re-ordering, content display, overview-issues (ToC, indexes etc) to features for exporting, printing and so on. Because of this complexity, the following will be a bit wordy - I will define the issue and at the same time try to clarify my vision:
Now, one of TWs strengths is that it is generic and adaptable, as opposed to specialized. It is e.g; a database - but it cannot replace any serious database. It can be used for calculations, but only very simple ones. It can be used to design websites... but not really. Point is this; my suggestion is aimed towards "average TiddlyWinking Joe", you and me, not Stephen King nor an expert technical writer. Thus; I'd guess the most common use for a TW is as a an everyday note book. A database to collect and access ideas, thoughts, snips of text. Perhaps with a designated topic, perhaps not. For creating writings *out of this*, the addition is that some tiddlers are "candidates for book content" (or articles etc). Clearly there are many ways to write books, articles etc, but TW allows for a **gradual, fractionated and parallel** build up of multiple books. Really notelets crystallizing into a greater whole.. or at least the beginning of greater wholes. The writing process (@ Eric Weir) Vincents top-down approach is definitely the classic way of writing, but where I see the potential for TW is for a bottom-up approach; i.e defining e.g chapters based on what natural groups of tiddlers have emerged **over time**. A typical(?) TW have after some time accumulated tiddlers with "character descriptions, that pie recipe, A+ fund managers, story plot ideas, that thermometer trick, cool villain phrases, snips from other authors, that drink, that insight on investing..." - and thanks to tagging of your tiddlers, a few "wholes" are crystallizing, some three separate books or articles or papers or whatever it is you aim at. Obviously; additional and dedicated work will be needed to transform loose tiddlers into a full script. But I firmly feel TW has the potential to bring a parallel composing aspect that few other tools can match. The core need For a top-down approach, a central issue is the outline to be filled. For the bottom-up approach, such an overview - in this case gradually generated - is still central to see where things are heading. This is comparable to OOo's Navigator or MS Words Outline, or just a table of contents. Such an overview gives a sense of what is covered in a to-be- book, how much content there is, where content is lacking and of course the outline of it all. The closest thing so far for a top-down approach in TW seems to be; http://twt-treeview-executive.tiddlyspot.com/ It is top-down because you must define a structure before hand. Tagglytagging is more bottoms-up, generating a tree based on tags; http://mptw.tiddlyspot.com/ I was delighted to learn of TiddlyDocs for TiddlyWeb, by PMario above; http://hoster.peermore.com/recipes/tiddlydocs-demo/tiddlers.wiki I haven't been able to play around with it enough yet, but it looks very promising... if it wasn't for that it appears to not be applicable to vanilla TW - or? Because a book is strictly linear, the sequence of tiddlers is crucial. Or, I should say, it's enough that the titles, as in a menu, are sequenced as desired. A key issue here, that typical TW solutions don't solve is to allow custom ordering. Twt-treeview, tagglytagging and the forEachTiddler plugin as well as most sorting and filtering algorithms existing in TW typically sort alphabetically. TiddlyDocs seems to allow "free" sequencing though, and even wonderfully allows re-ordering by a very smooth dragn'drop! Ok, I think I'd better not write longer or I'll loose everyone. Thoughts? :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en.
