Let's talk about filters

[Recon]

It seems I’ve chosen an awkward time to begin my 14 day trial, as the online documentation appears to be in flux. I’m trying to learn the features of the software as quickly as possible, so I can make a decision whether or not to spend the AU$100 for this. Unfortunately, after two days, I’m discovering quite a few unintuitive behaviors that I could really use some help with. Just yesterday, I was reading the online documentation, trying to learn the basic principles behind the software, only to discover that the docs are outdated and have been replaced with a series of “Guides” that appear to be incomplete.

A critical feature for me is filters. I’ve got an expansive high fantasy saga I’m writing, and I’ve never found a good tool to properly represent my timeline. Aeon seems to be my best bet so far, but working with it has been frustrating to say the least. Very quickly, I found the UI overwhelmed with character life bars and events. I tried using filters to narrow it down, but the behavior is unintuitive and inconsistent. The dropdown options “Match All” vs “Match Any” appear to be an AND/OR logic toggle, but I’m not sure. The other dropdown options “Match Any” vs “Match None” seem like they’re an inclusive/exclusive toggle. But the wording (both share a “Match Any” option that means different things) is misleading. At least it might be. I’m still struggling to get it to work as expected.

As I’m in my trial period, I would be extremely grateful for a FULL explanation of the filter system, as this is going to be the most critical part of my workflow to make visible only the elements that I’m working on and not clutter up the UI with the hundreds or thousands of items I’ll be entering for the whole saga.

[Recon]

Here’s an issue:

I’ve put a date filter in the spreadsheet view so I could narrow it down to just the events around a specific time period. However, this has caused a strange problem when I try to enter new events using the spreadsheet view. I’ll type in the Label field and hit enter as usual, but it refuses to show the event and allow me to drag it into the timeline view window. Instead, I get this warning message:

It seems the software requires an unfiltered date range in order to see newly entered events in spreadsheet view. This is a problem because what if I have 10,000 items in the entire timeline? I need the date filter so that I can focus on a specific window of time, but the software causes newly entered events to vanish before I can give them a date. When I remove the filters, the event shows up.

Is this how it’s supposed to function? It would be super helpful if the interface would allow me to at least enter the date before filtering it out of the view.

[Peter_T]

Yes, it is impractical that a new element cannot be edited because it does not fulfill the filter criteria during creation.

However, I think that this problem can be easily avoided. I usually enter events in the timeline view, where I can easily set the desired time period and then create the events by double-clicking in the workspace. This also has the advantage that you get the date and time, which you then only have to correct minimally.

Otherwise, filters don’t play a major role in my workflow. I mainly use the grouping option, whereby the groups can be shown and hidden quite easily. Admittedly, it takes a while to optimize your own way of working and make full use of the software’s available options. I wouldn’t commit to a specific concept like filtering from the start.

When it comes to bulk input of existing data, you might want to look at the csv import option.

[Recon]

Thanks for those tips. I will have to explore csv entering, though I’d first have to get the data properly formatted into csv to begin with, which feels like doing the work twice. Most of the stuff is in my head or in random notes, so I’ll be entering things off the cuff the majority of the time. Main reason I entered in the spreadsheet view was for fluidity because it’s a lot fewer clicks to bang out a series of events than to do it in the timeline view. But I’ll still give it a shot to see how that feels.

Filters are super huge for me because without them, the display is going to be absolutely cluttered with characters and events that are not relevant to the area I’m working on. It’s 25,000 years of history and six eras. A lot of books planned and an integrated overarching plot that covers the whole thing. Aeon is the only tool I’ve seen that potentially can handle it. Though I just learned Obsidian two weeks ago and that’s my canon, repository of knowledge. But it doesn’t do timelines and I really need to see how events mesh together in order to write believable scenarios.

Hopefully I can figure some of these filter quirks out in this software. I’ve spent the day now reading the new web guides and feature lists. I’m taking notes with questions to ask, so I’ll probably make a few more threads soon. I feel 95% sure that I’ll buy the software at this point. Just need to be sure it can do the job before I commit.

[SCN (Steve)]

@Recon

Main reason I entered in the spreadsheet view was for fluidity because it’s a lot fewer clicks to bang out a series of events than to do it in the timeline view.

I outlined my novel, a fantasy with (so far) 57 scenes, in the Outline view. I wasn’t so much concerned with the exact dates and times, but with the narrative flow of the story I was imagining. In a later stage I paid more attention to the dates/times and made adjustments as needed.

The downside to my approach has been that if I wanted to view my story in the Spreadsheet/Timeline/Subway views (Subway being the most useful for me), my Narrative view would be out of sync with them and I’d have to spend time putting the Spreadsheet and Outline views into the same order. The good news is that version 3.5 will let us optionally view the Narrative/Outline views in the Timeline and Subway views, so I’m looking forward to that.

I’m sharing my approach only because it’s been working well for me, in case it’s helpful.

Out of curiosity, will you be syncing with Scrivener?

[Recon]

Yes, I plan on using Scrivener with Aeon, though I can only speculate on how smooth that might go. The last few weeks have been a blizzard of research trying to find the best tools, beginning with Scrivener then realizing its note organizing feature wouldn’t be sufficient, so I focused on Obsidian for that, resolving to use Scrivener just for plotting the narrative and actual writing. But then I found Obsidian doesn’t do timelines and AI directed me to try out Aeon. It’s looking good so far.

I poked my head into the “Narrative Folder” UI but I’m quite unsure how it works. I have a feeling I’ll be making good use of it. I’m really getting my mind around the difference between timeline and narrative. It’s been a revelation because when I plot out the events, there’s a lot more time than I expected between them. The chapters I’ve written were all done without meticulous event timing, so now I’m seeing the reality of how much time so and so spends at the market in order to align with a different person who was at the tavern. When writing, it’s pretty easy to just handwave that stuff, but I’ve always had this nagging worry in the back of my mind that I will write myself into a corner by misaligning things. One thing is for certain: The narrative only shows a fraction of what characters actually do!

57 scenes is pretty big. The complexity would surely justify the use of Aeon. I’ve often found myself overthinking when writing as I try to visualize the flow. Now, that should be a whole lot easier. Once I learn this crazy software, that is.

[SCN (Steve)]

The cool thing about working with Aeon Timeline is that we can imagine a story in a kind of flowing narrative, then, in a later stage, revise as needed to make the timing of things work. I find I can either let my imagination flow or focus on the details; I can’t seem to do both and make any kind of reasonable progress. So, doing things in stages seems to be the way forward (for me, at least).

I’m with you on figuring out the right tools. I, too, use Obsidian extensively and even experimented with doing my entire novel series with it. Like you, though, I needed the kind of timeline capability that only Aeon Timeline offers, the Subway view being the one I most value. So, I’m now using AT3, Scrivener, and Obsidian. Seems to be the right setup.

[Recon]

That’s fantastic. I was just reading the online docs about the Narrative view and I got to wondering, how well does it work with a multiple book series? If all your stories share the same timeline, is Narrative able to keep the books separate? I see there are folders, though it doesn’t seem to allow placing a folder within a folder. When I try, it just reorders them. I’d prefer not to have to make entirely separate timeline projects for each book because that would make it impossible to keep them up to date when I add events.

[SCN (Steve)]

I’m writing a three-novel series in one project. I set up my narrative sections as Novel > Chapter > Scene > Passage in settings:

Here’s how it looks in the Outline view:

In my case, I did the initial outline entirely in Outline view in AT3. Then I created a new project in Scrivener and was happy to discover that when I used AT3’s sync feature, it set up Scrivener perfectly. As I hadn’t spent much time in Scrivener, this was a happy discovery. It even duplicated the three-novel setup that I created in AT3.

[Recon]

That’s really cool. I need to get my head around these custom item types and how to correlate things like story beats with timeline events. By and large, my writing is in chronological order, so I doubt I’ll be scrambling the sequence of things even though the software allows for it. Will be plenty of references to ancient past events though, so that’s probably a good use for it.

Looks like you’ve expanded away from just using a generic ‘event’ for all events and made customized versions? Is that just for keeping it straight visually or are they functionally different from each other?

[Amontillado]

I’ve considered reinstalling Scrivener as a notes database for Aeon. I’d like to be able to write 500 words of summary for an event. That little summary field isn’t enough.

Linking to documents in Devonthink is workable but isn’t quite syncing.

You might look into using Scrivener as your bulk input tool. I’m pretty sure you can create new Aeon events from new Scrivener documents.

Aeon would be well served to sync with Obsidian. Aeon’s fields would just be in frontmatter YAML on the Obsidian side.

Devonthink can create a tab separated values metadata overview file. Aeon can directly import that.

I think I need to experiment with Aeon as a display-only tool, picking up everything from Devonthink.

[SCN (Steve)]

@Recon

I need to get my head around these custom item types and how to correlate things like story beats with timeline events.
…
Looks like you’ve expanded away from just using a generic ‘event’ for all events and made customized versions? Is that just for keeping it straight visually or are they functionally different from each other?

Yes, indeed. I use them to filter scenes or to drill down on, say, story beats in, say, the Subway view. I can even isolate those scenes where that pesky sword was used.

In case it’s helpful, here are the Item Types I use:

• Event
• Beat
• Character
• Character Group
• Location
• Object
• Spell
• Theme
• Great Ruling House
• Kingdom
• Compose (for marking scenes where I'll be composing music)
• Prophesy
• Novel (for isolating Novel 1, Novel 2, Novel 3)
• Goal

[SCN (Steve)]

@Amontillado

Aeon would be well served to sync with Obsidian. Aeon’s fields would just be in frontmatter YAML on the Obsidian side.

You can achieve this now by using Scrivener’s compile function to write metadata in the form of YAML. So, have AT3 sync its metadata with Scrivener, then use Scrivener to compile .md files with the metadata written as YAML. (In disclosure, I haven’t tried it, but I’ve discussed it over on the Scrivener forum.)

[Recon]

@SCN

Yes, indeed. I use them to filter scenes or to drill down on, say, story beats in, say, the Subway view. I can even isolate those scenes where that pesky sword was used

I see your Chapter 1.1 is a folder inside another folder. How did you manage that? When I create two narrative folders, I can’t drag one inside the other.

Also, I’m curious if you create blocks of time as event containers. It’s tricky to explain what I mean so I’ll use an example from my book one:

I have to emphasize that I’ve only been using AT3 for about 3 days, so I really have no idea what I’m doing. But I’m trying to absorb the complexities of the workflow and will hopefully find more optimal ways of doing things.

This story is a primer for my saga. It introduces my main setting by having a protagonist come in from the capital city to investigate the myths surrounding a particular forest. What you see with the colored blocks are spans of time where the protagonist is in different phases of the journey. These aren’t really specific “events” as I still have to enter those. But they do give me a to-scale representation of how long each leg of the journey takes.

I may just use these as placeholders until I enter specifics. But then again, there are “Periods” in AT3 which I haven’t seen any mention of in the docs.

I love the fact that I can collapse the entire overarching event for this and it just becomes another single entry in the master timeline. That’s massive for me because otherwise I’d be drowning in irrelevant clutter when trying to see the big picture.

I’m very interested in learning the Narrative view though. That’s the biggest area I haven’t explored yet in AT3. Your narrative is populated with a lot of stuff in a hierarchy. I’m very interested in being able to do that as well, though it’s hard to know exactly how to begin. I don’t have any custom item types made, for example. Just using generic events and characters so far.

[SCN (Steve)]

@Recon

I see your Chapter 1.1 is a folder inside another folder. How did you manage that? When I create two narrative folders, I can’t drag one inside the other.
…
I’m very interested in learning the Narrative view though. That’s the biggest area I haven’t explored yet in AT3. Your narrative is populated with a lot of stuff in a hierarchy. I’m very interested in being able to do that as well, though it’s hard to know exactly how to begin. I don’t have any custom item types made, for example. Just using generic events and characters so far.

I show you how I set that up in this video: https://youtu.be/UcO4Q9-YisM?si=gz6JTBHXdaC89Pmv

Also, I’m curious if you create blocks of time as event containers.

It never occurred to me to do something like this, but so that you know, I seldom work from the Timeline view.

[Recon]

Fantastic! Thanks for that. It’s a pretty easy system once you know.
But before you know? That’s another story. haha

The reason I was confused originally is because I was in this interface:

From here, it won’t let you drag a folder into another folder because this is a list of all folders regardless of how they are associated with each other.

Turns out the “Type” column was already on by default. And it helps a lot with the “Automatic” assigned types like you said…

Now I feel like I should set up a new Youtube channel for the writing project. I’ve got my old gaming channel that I’ve recently stopped posting to but I’ve made 735 videos for that thing and it might be worthwhile to put some content out talking about writing tools and processes. Never know. May get a bestseller one day and it’d be fun to go back and see how it all began.

[SCN (Steve)]

I’m glad this was helpful. Sounds like you’re getting your sea legs.

[Recon]

I’m just going to write the conclusion of my original question to mark the thread as solved.

The key to filters is in understanding how the combination of choices affects what is displayed in the Workspace.

First, select Filters from the Sidebar.

Then, select Focused View from the Left Panel. This lets you customize filters on a per-view basis, since the Workspace can be divided into panes each with their own view.

There is a dropdown at the top of the Sidebar that can switch from Match All to Match Any. This sets up the logic of the various conditions you’re about to choose. Selecting Match All will use “AND” logic, while selecting Match Any will use “OR” logic.

Next, there are distinct groups of conditions to pick from. The top is Color, the next one down is Type, and so on. Each group has its own dropdown at its top that lets you pick between “Match Any” and “Match None”. The “Tags” group also adds a “Match All” option.

What this logic selector does is determine the behavior of your choices. So in my example above, I have all my Tags selected except Tentpole Event. I also have “Match None” chosen. The result of this is any item that has the OTHER tags will be excluded from the view. This is how you can filter out large swaths of content from the view by selecting which tags you want to exclude. If you use “Match Any” instead, then it inverts the selection, making any item with the chosen tags show up and all other items hidden.

I find Tags to be the most helpful way of hiding large amounts of content in very customizable ways since any item can have as many tags as you want.

Other groups like Type and Date will also apply filters on an inclusive or exclusive basis. But importantly, that FIRST logic choice (Any vs All) is going to choose how the different selection groups behave together. For instance, if I set up my tags so only a certain group of events or characters show up, I can also pick one of the Races from my custom “Race” property and now only items having to do with that race AND the appropriate tags will display. Or maybe I’m using Match Any at the top, at which point all the items of the specified tags will show up in addition to any item having to do with the selected race.

It’s an extremely powerful interface, but it’s also very tricky to get your head around it at first exposure to the software. Knowing how the logic conditions are set up is critical, to translate the user interface into a proper AND / OR string.

Next, there’s the Footer at the very bottom of the screen.
This has fairly straightforward options to choose what data from your items shows up in the timeline view and also what Types to include in the view. Groups is handy if you want to track events having to do with different characters or locations separately rather than having them all jumbled together in one view.

That’s pretty much how filters work.

This feature was my “dealbreaker” feature. I needed this to handle a very large and complex high fantasy saga full of interconnected events and characters. And the software passes. I’m legitimately surprised, but yes, it does pass. I’ll be buying it.

[SCN (Steve)]

Thank you for steering us back to the original question. I’m glad you found a tool to move your writing project forward. It sounds massive!

[Recon]

It sounds massive!

Haha… Well you could say that!

Building a whole saga simultaneously is a bit unorthodox and requires very robust tools to keep everything straight. I’m glad Aeon Timeline is able to handle it. And Obsidian.