It would hugely expand what I could do with Scapple if you support a different kind of indentation in a note. I basically use two different formats for scribbling down my ideas, a graph of some sort (you’ve mostly nailed that) and an outline. Adding this feature to a note will add hugely to my use of Scapple.
Right now, when you hit tab, a single line is indented. I want to hit a key, cmd-] or something and indent all future lines. The main reason is so that wrapped lines will also be indented. Bullets would be cool, but unnecessary.
The lack of indenting means (for me anyway) that notes are limited to a few lines at most. I need to use indenting to make long notes readable.
Bob. I find the readability problem of long notes can be overcome by making each new paragraph a note in its own right, within a stack. In a similar way, I think you could create each of your multi-line indents within a separate note. If I don’t use borders around each note, the whole lot can look as if it belongs together: just separately paragraphed; or, in your case, indented.
If needs be, perhaps one of the new magnetic background shapes could put such a series of notes into a ‘box’ for you, with or without a printing outline. (I’ve not tried this myself yet.)
Thanks for the suggestions, but they seem too cumbersome. Right now I just insert newlines and tabs when I need to. Even that means you spend too much time on formatting and distracted from the task of thinking about the problem.
To clarify the suggestion, all you need to do to start a new paragraph is hit [b]Cmd-Return[/b] and continue typing. This results in an amount of spacing that clearly distinguishes each paragraph without the need for indents, and is ultimately more flexible as each paragraph can be individually linked to if desired, or shuffled around into a new order. Meanwhile “stacks” as they are called, can be easily selected together with [b]Opt-Cmd-A[/b], making the movement of a column of text as easy as if it were one note. Stacks also prefer sibling order when exporting, meaning the end result will likely be what you need of it—linear text.
[size=80]This level of analysis could not be done if this were a single linear text note.[/size]
This is in fact one of the intended uses for the feature, and when you import a text document, Scapple even asks if you would like to adopt this format as an option.
Hmmm, that made me look at it some more. I think perhaps a very simple enhancement would make it just about sufficient. When you go into Movement Mode, arrow keys move the selection a pixel or so at a time. If tab and shift-tab moved the selection a larger set amount like .25 or .5 inch, it would make the whole process fairly easy.
I don’t know any current way of producing a consistent indent. Am I missing something else?
Try Shift-Arrow, that amplifies the amount of movement by roughly the amount you specified as being ideal. But do note that shifting items to the right will break the stack. They are kind of considered one “unit” of information by the software until you move the left margin off of flush (so that would include a visually indented note). You would need to re-stack to glue it back together, and doing so would align the left borders flush again. You can have variable widths in a stack, they just need to be lined up on the left to be recognised as such.
OK, shift-arrow works well enough. I’d choose a larger distance if I could but two arrow hits is not that onerous. I could have sworn I tired arrow with all the modifier keys but I guess I missed one.
I have started trying to using cmd-return and stacking for outline style notes. The current implementation of stacking does not lend itself to this type of grouping of notes as an outline. During creation it works well enough. However, once you have a stack of notes and have indented some, it is really a pain to insert new information anywhere or to delete information. For example, in a stack of paragraphs, some indented, if you add a line to a paragraph, the stacking behavior will be invoked like you would like.
It appears that a stack is recognized by a set vertical distribution and aligned left edges. If this were relaxed so that left edges did not have to be aligned, but only within a certain distance for adjacent notes, then the outlining problem I described would mostly go away I think.
If the above change were made I think that also implies that the Stack command should not always align all note’s left edges. Otherwise “restacking” an outline would not be useful.
In fact we discussed the feasibility of that shortly after I wrote my original response, and for now it will have to stay that way it is implemented, mainly because removing the left-edge restriction from stacking would make it too permissive. We’d need some kind of UI for indicating when a drag and drop would result in something being stacked, and given that we’re close to release, that is a large change to make internally. It has not been stricken from the list of things to look into doing down the road though. So stay tuned.
Just to let you know that for the next update, I have added an “Indent” feature. Tab will indent notes, Opt-tab will out-dent them. The notes themselves remain left-aligned in the stack, but the text inside it gets indented:
