Timeline Software for Windows

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1

I have a large story timeline to work out and I’m using the Windows version of Scrivener. Does anyone have suggestions for timeline software on the Windows side of the Scrivener world?

Here are some wishlist items:

  • Since I also might do fantasy, I would like to be able to define my own calendar: hours, days, months, years. Actually I would like to be able to describe an arbitrary hierarchy of time units, e.g., this world has two moons or two suns and that causes some time unit to get subdivided in strange ways.
  • Ability to link to arbitrary documents - PDF file, Word deocs, odt docs, spreadsheets, etc.
  • Ability to keep some text in pages in the timeline app itself so that I am not forced to use another app when I just need to store some notes (rich text support here would be great)

If anyone has any pointers to Windows timeline software, I would appreciate pointers.

Thanks.

2

This probably doesn’t fulfil (all) your requirements but as no-one else had made any better suggestions…

Have you tried Xtimeline?

3

I’m looking for such a software for ages now and have not found one yet. Perhaps we could try to gather all people interested in such and convince either some open source programmers or a software firm to produce what we want/need?

4

Would it not also make sense to think about switching to the Mac? Here you could use the Scrivener and several nice timeline programs (Aeon, Beedocs3D, Tinderbox just to name a few) that already do what you want.

5

If budget weren’t tight, maybe. However, I have lots of (licensed) software on my Windows machine which makes it hard to switch. Anyway, I think there’s money in it for Windows programmers, so I still have hope.

6

Uh, and I forgot: I have found timeline software, albeit mostly rather simple ones. Best one yet:

thetimelineproj.sourceforge.net/

7

What about cobbling something together yourself? The SIMILE timeline http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ is pretty impressive, platform independent and maybe it does what you want out of the box already?
Play around with it, it is not a static image but interactive which is easy to miss.

8

Prion, great link, thanks very much. This works fine (as well as the software in my post) for any contemporary or historical novel. Fantasy and SF novelists will not be as happy with this as I with my historical novel project.