Writing & Editing

 

  • Cuttings remember everything you cut. Cmd-shift-v to paste from your Cuttings.
  • Automatic Outline. Pinch to collapse the documents to only see the headings. Click on a heading to jump or click outside or ESC to return to main body.
  • Powerful Find. Select text and cmd-f to see only sentences which includes the selected text. Click on a sentence to jump to it’s location in the document or click in the margin to return to regular view. + also more Advanced Text Views
  • Interactive LiveText where you can make sentences conditional. For example, if the sentence contains a date you can choose to have a different sentence after that date (initial sentence: "In June we will...' and post-June sentence: "In June we planned...". This can also be done with numbers in sentences, where a % number change can result in a different result when clicked and edited (sliding up and down), as Brett Victor has demonstrated.
  • Backwards scroll with companies and people being automatically replaced with pictures or logos for visual search.
  • Final Cut Pro style 'Auditions' for paragraphs so you can write and re-write and decide later which version you want to keep.
  • Ability to collapse lists
  • Write and edit mathematical equations
  • Key-logging - log all your keystrokes in a separate part of the document so that you can come back to view any part of your earlier writing.
  • Optional quiet sounds effects to make interactions feel more substantial, including on pinching the document
  • 'Insert Current Location' command to quickly geotag entries
  • Move command. Same as Cut & Paste but with previous clipboard being restored
  • Shortcut to turn on/off speech to text transcription

 

 

Tagging

 

Make what is now considered meta-information an integral part of the document:

 

  • Automatic tagging to help you find information later, including where you are working, your typing tempo (for recording who typed and possibly what mood you were in) and much more... None of this will be shared with the creators of Author and this will not be part of your document on export, but it will create a rich opportunity to build useful ways for you to analyse your own documents later.
  • Tagging Grammar with tag-types ('born in' 'visited' etc.) to build semantic meaning
  • People tags. We can tag relationships with documents, why not also with people? The identities of people will be through aggregation of attributes, such as publications and biographical data, not relying on any one central database.
  • Vannevar Bush style Tagged Browser Trails.
  • Pasted text tagged as pasted with paths/information of where it came from and when it was pasted.
  • Auto tag text with inclusion of all data from Wikipedia data-boxes for use in contextual search. For example you can then search the document for a city and someone who was born there will show up (provided this person is in wikipedia or similar accessible database).
  • All  typing keylogged for future revisions.

 

 

 

Rich Linking

 

When you create a link you have access to making it a rich link:

 

  • Link Types (supportive, disapproving etc.).
  • More than one link from one location.
  • Link Analysis.
  • Linking to other, local documents using relative addressing.
  • In-Document Link. User chooses text and in the ctrl-click menu and chooses Tag/Link/In-Document and in a sub-menu is presented with all the headings in the document. Choosing one makes this a link to that location. The bottom of the list is 'Un-Link'.
  •  & more since links are as important as what they link.

 

 

Multidimensional Views

 

A key precept of Doug Engelbart's work is the concept of giving the user user access to powerful ways to view information, what he refereed to as ViewSpecs. This is also important to the work of Ted Nelson whose work has also fundamentally informed this project.

 

Please note: The illustrations and basic concepts outlined here do not show the powerful view manipulations the user will be able to perform, such as only see certain connections and so on, as this will require experimentation to fully understand and implement - to fully realise.

 

There are three proposed ways to implement this in Author, as what could be called 'concept map' views.

 

NOTE: 'Concept Map' views are essentially the same as 'Mind Maps' but don't require a central node.

 

Headings View  |  Illustration View  |  Documents View