Scrivener Keywords in Aeon - Don't Call Them Tags, and Don't Dick with the Order

Feature Requests
#1

Greetings!

If I set Keywords in Scrivener, it’s great that I can see them in Aeon v3 without explicitly telling Aeon to sync them. But Aeon calls them “Tags”–why? There is no Item Type Tags, and no list of Tags. I suggest you call them “Keywords” in Aeon. Or even “Scrivener: Keywords”.

This is fabulous because Keywords are not an Aeon Item Type. Keywords belong to Scrivener. Scrivener sets the spelling, default order, colors, etc. And in Scrivener, when I use Keywords I can order them any way I want.

It’s fabulous that I can edit Keywords in Aeon. Fabulous that when I start to type one in, Aeon suggests an existing keyword, unless I misspell it or it’s new, then it pushes the new Keyword back to Scrivener, which is as good as anyone can expect.

But Aeon dicks with my Keyword order. And when it syncs, it pushes that dicked-up order back into Scrivener. This is evil. Don’t dick with the order! Yes, when I add a new Keyword in Aeon it will end up in whatever order (I suggest at the end). If I care, I can fix the order (or fix the spelling) back in Scrivener. But don’t go dicking around with Keywords in Aeon unless I edit Keywords in Aeon.

This is in Feature Requests because it goes beyond a bug. This was explicitly coded into Aeon this way.

Thanks a million!

2 Likes
#2

Only the developers, of course, can answer the question definitively. But if I were to hazard a guess, it’s because tags are most commonly known as, well, tags. Since AT is a standalone application, it makes sense to refer to them as tags.

The friction you’re encountering is when optionally syncing with Scrivener. Scrivener calls them keywords. I note that the Scrivener manual tells us that its keywords are the same thing as tags–begging the question as to why Scrivener doesn’t just call them tags in the first place.

But sure, perhaps AT could call them something like “tags/keywords” to make it more clear that when syncing with Scrivener, it’s syncing Scrivener’s keywords.

#3

But what are Tags? There’s no list of them, no way to manage them. They simply exist within Event/Properties (along with Summary). Within Item Type Settings there is Properties, but mine are blank. Do these Properties have anything to do with Event/Properties?

And compared to the massive battle I faced getting sync to work with anything else (coming from Aeon v2 and converting to v3), there’s zero friction getting Tags to sync with Scrivener. You completely ignore Scrivener Keywords and they automagically sync with Tags.

But what are Tags? And WTF does Aeon so love it’s version of Tags so much, that it has to dick with Scrivener’s Keywords? And yet, Aeon never shows us it’s version of Tags. Where’s the list? How do we manage them? Or maybe they don’t exist.

But serious now…

Some pieces of shared data belong to Scrivener, and some belong to Aeon. It’s brilliant that we can edit this data from the “wrong” app. In v2 we couldn’t edit Summary, but now we can—a very welcome change. And if I’m editing a scene in Scrivener and add a character, I can go to Custom Metadata and type the added character’s name into the Characters box. There’s no way to verify how I styled the last name in Aeon until I open Aeon and Sync. I can live with this limitation.

But Keywords belong to Scrivener, and Tags seem to be a nothing in Aeon. So why does Aeon treat Keywords as if it owns them?

#4

Lots to unpack here, hard for me because I don’t have the expertise with AT3 that others do.

I guess my first thought is that I don’t understand the idea that either Scrivener or AT3 “owns” shared data. Changing data in one doesn’t change it in the other, unless you sync. But why is this important? I don’t know. I’m still trying to understand the concept of data “ownership” in this context. (I don’t doubt that there is something important I’m missing–but what?)

As for tags, they seem to sync automatically with Scrivener’s tags (Keywords). I never really thought about this before because, as I said, I don’t use them. However, upon checking AT3, there isn’t a master list of tags, unlike in item types, such as the Characters item type. In that sense, there isn’t a list of the tags, per se.

However, tags do seem useful in certain views, such as Spreadsheet, Narrative, and Outline. For example, in Narrative view:

002
002767×916 47.2 KB

or in Outline view:

004
0042023×480 45.2 KB

This has been a useful discussion for me, because I think I’ll start using tags once I get to the revision stage.

#5

Hey @ScottyDM thanks for flagging this one with us.

Having Aeon Timeline override the order of keywords you’ve set in Scrivener is not ideal. We’ve been able to reproduce that behavior and have it queued to be fixed in a future version of the app.

2 Likes
#6

Thank you, Rob. That’s awesome.

1 Like