Andrew, well said.
Out of curiosity, what is the “text in, text out” feature of which you speak? (The feature I’m waiting for is being able to model the narrative/outline views via the subway view.)
Hi Steve, yes, I too am waiting for the narrative order subway view. The text in text out feature I’m referring to is simply a text export feature. I’ve spent a large amount of time putting various textual elements into various property boxes but, apart from syncing to Scrivener or Ulysses, or via CSV, there is no way to output a full textual outline for me to review. I am really old school when it comes to outlining. I like to outline like Ken Follett does. Long hand and scene by scene. We are, after all, writers. Aeon supports the writing process with its relational database qualities, but I want an outline to be generated so I can review it and export it into Scrivener or Ulysses. Much like Plottr does.
One big disappointment was the lack of feedback after I filled in the survey about text exporting. I suspect this wouldn’t be coming straight away with the new release. But I’m hoping it could be part of the reason for the delay.
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Ah, okay–makes sense.
Well, maybe not. I outlined my novel entirely in AT3, and when “done” (it’s an iterative process, so it’s never really done, to be honest, since things get moved, added, and deleted in the drafting stage), I synced with Scrivener. Voila, the novels of the series and their respective chapters, scenes, and passages were now in Scrivener, where I could begin drafting. I found it light years ahead of Pltter.
I wonder why my experience using AT3 to outline differs from yours?
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Oh, absolutely. Aeon Timeline is far superior to Plottr. But what Plottr does do well is it allows writers to breathe and think in wide open textual spaces. I’ve become a little claustrophobic with small, unformatted text boxes in AT3. They work okay and you can make them receive whatever snippet of information you want, which is really powerful. But I just want more room. I think better that way.
And syncing only yields fragmented snippets of scene specific story information. Which is amazing when you sit down to write. But outlining is a prewriting workflow. And I want to produce detailed, multi page long outlines, stitched together from AT3’s small (or hopefully bigger in the future) boxes, that almost read like a book. And then iterate them as the ideas flow. And then, when the dust settles, sync the ‘final’ working version to my writing app of choice (the story will inevitably change as I write, it always does).
Aeon Timeline can do both types of workflow. The detailed scene specific, synced workflow and the longer form, single document outline workflow. But only if a text export is implemented. In some ways I want Plottr and AT3 to get together and have an illegitimate love child.
Or maybe Scrivener/ Ulysses is still the best solution? Both apps have powerful workflows which go quite some way to how I use AT3.
Interestingly, I am planning a series of articles on outlining on my Medium blog. The above issues will feature somewhere along the line, I’m sure. I just need to outline the articles first 
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Okay, this is helpful. What I call an “outline” is much more brief than what you describe. Perhaps I should have called my “outline” the “initial outline,” a concise iteration of scenes. I do invent many of the characters in this stage, as well as locations, etc. But it’s terse–no need for expansive writing at this initial stage.
In my current novel series, I moved over to Obsidian to develop the outline and flesh out the story. I enjoyed the expansive writing space of Obsidian for that, which, I agree, AT3 doesn’t offer. I’ve now returned to AT3 synced to Scrivener for the drafting stage.
I wonder if I could use AT3 synced to Scrivener next time around for everything, including the story bible. That would give me the expansive writing space of Scrivener needed to flesh out my story (a more in-depth outline) and write the narrative, while keeping everything synced with AT3 for tracking and analysis of elements like story beats, locations, objects, and so on.
Thoughts?
A detailed, fully fleshed out outline has become an essential part of my writing process. I don’t necessarily need to know absolutely everything about the story, or even have it all nailed down so it can never change (it always does). But I want my characters to walk around the world I am asking them to inhabit, get to hear their motivations, their goals, their desires. How they start out in the story and how they change as the story unfolds, and how their change affects them and the other characters? Have I got some characters who are mere placeholders? Characters who need more work? A premise which works? Or one which leads down a dead end? All of which I want to ask and answer before I sit down and invest months of work on a project which doesn’t have legs. And writing it all down, and asking those questions as I do, really helps me think more clearly and see potential issues and solutions.
Currently that detailed outline sits in Ulysses. Although I am seriously considering bringing my current project across to Scrivener. Ulysses has been dropping the ball a little too much for my liking recently, and Scrivener has oodles of power when it comes to outlining (as I’m sure you already know, as you use it). Although at this stage I’m not referring to the multicolumn outliner which represents the Draft folder. My detailed outlines have to sit outside of the Draft area. It’s no use to me to be confined to a notes section, or metadata text box in Scrivener. Else I’m returning in some part to the constraints AT3 currently has for me.
Which does raise an interesting workflow question which I have been pondering. Where does AT3 currently fit into this? And, more importantly, how could it fit into it in a future text export version of AT3?
My current thoughts are that as AT3 currently stands, the two sit separately. In the current version of AT3 I can’t write expansively. So I have to flesh out the full outline and its multiple iterations inside, say Scrivener, and then when I am happy with that, split the narrative elements out and move them to the Draft folder and sync them and each of the character and location and any other item documents back to AT3.
In my dream of a future text export version of AT3, with hopefully a bigger, more expansive writing area, I would hope that I could write every part of the outline in AT3. Then export a detailed outline document in Word format into Scrivener and review it there. Then iterate changes in AT3 and export it again as version 2. And so forth, until I am happy with it. Once I am, I can sync the structural scene by scene narrative elements and characters and locations etc straight into folders in Scrivener and then use them to track the various story elements. Same AT3 file, but different outputs for each stage of the writing process.
In terms of Scrivener working as a story bible, some of it I’ve described above. But it obviously needs a full text export in AT3 to yield that detailed outline. Scrivener has flexible and powerful ways of linking documents internally. Just as Obsidian does (minus the graph view of course). It even has backlinks (or incoming links) which pop up in the bookmarks section of a linked document and autocomplete suggestions when creating links. So, absolutely, you could utilise that, regardless of whether AT3 adds textual export or not in the future.
Not sure if any of that helps?
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I’m into my 3rd month with AT3 and Scivener but also use Obsidian for research and initial crafting of scene fragments. The new Bases feature in Obsidian has enabled me to status these fragments and work them to a place where they go into Scrivener for drafting.
I could not be happier about writing using these three tools. The syncing between AT3 and Scrivener works flawlessly.
@ahansonauthor - regarding expansive text, it would be nice to have notes attached to scenes like Plottr does; something north of summary (synopsis). For me, it would be satisfactory to just scrape the text from the rtf “note” for a scrivener scene and the text from the character files - and send them on a one way trip into AT3; keep the gospel in Scrivener.
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Looks like Aeon releases major versions every Q4 of the year
https://www.aeontimeline.com/release-notes
3.4 was released in Nov 2024
3.3 in Nov 2023
3.2 in Aug 2023
3.1.4 in Mar 2022
3.0 in Oct 2021
So somewhere between September to November 2025 we’ll get 3.5
@AeonRob - I’ve just wrapped up the video and was hoping to discuss text export with you. My recommendation would be to put them into markdown files (.md). Given how much time has passed, I was curious to see how these Q1 goals turned out - do we get them into the latest build?
Do you have a similar video for Q3??
I believe I bought this app several years ago, way before v3 3 and it’s wonderful to see the small team is still at it.
I have lots of thoughts, especially when it comes to how data is currently stored within the app, users’ ability to get that data, or export it. Have there been any discussions about loading this data into a GCP or AWS project & rapidly expanding functionality by integrating AI/ML models or even Knowledgebase Chat Apps? Even just a simple MCP server for Aeon Timeline could get very, very exciting for users, but also what then becomes possible for the application itself.
Considering spending some more time with AT3, and would love to know if you had 15-20 minutes to jump on a call & discuss the progress made thus far, that feature roadmap & if Aeon Timeline has any interest in an MLops Engineer integrating the latest and greatest in LLMs. Simply giving voice commands or talking with your timeline to make edits, for instance…
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Hi everyone,
Sorry we’ve been a bit quiet lately, but we’re excited to now have an alpha build in the quality control stage as we prep for a beta release in the coming weeks.
We intended to reach this stage a bit sooner, but some things have taken longer than we’d hoped, and we’ve had a couple of issues outside of work to juggle along the way.
@ahansonauthor 3.5 will have a text export to both Word and Markdown 
We’ll be really interested in gathering everyone’s feedback on the way this works and how the files are formatted once we’re in beta.
@jcachat Thanks for your thoughts on AI integration. We are very interested in the future potential of that, but it’s not on the immediate roadmap.
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If you go through and read all the discussions in this forum about export to Markdown, you will find many thoughts on format etc. but you should actually let people decide for themself, what’s going to YAML keys, what the want as headers, and if they want the export to go to a flat file system or a folder hierarchy, and let the users define what that hierachy should be based on… e.g. Event’s, People, items/entities, or more like chapters…
Because, remember that there are many people using Aeon for a lot more than just a writers tool…
My setup in Markdown have a folder hierachy based om objects like people, ships, addresses and houses, companies, ports and journeys, BUT I also have a complete folder hierachy built around how sources connect to repositories etc.
So an export tailored for writers will not do me any good at all.
Just as an example…
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I, too, like the idea of having YAML metadata definable, particularly if it can be mapped optionally to the various item types, relationships, etc. of AT.
I’m not entirely sure about how a folder hierarchy would work, given that an MD file is just a text file–maybe a hierarchical numbering system appended to the exported .md file names would work.
We writers would also love to leverage such export flexibility. 
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A folder hierarchy could e.g. be made based on types, selected by the user…
Say you want a Hierarchal structure of your Location or place database, e.g. Country/State/County/Municipally/City/Street/Street Number (House) /Apartment number
and a folder structure for all your people
another folder for all your Items
and yet another for all your Events and Sub-Events
The best way to sort and order this will actually be to use a folder hierarchy, else your notes would be extremely long if you have a few thousand items… or if you use a flat file structure it would be really messy really fast, imagene 200K small files in one folder… (just an example)…
You can still link it all together with wiki links, but you will have a way to use the notes with other applications to, e.g. linking them from within a network graph software, a genealogy software or any other research tool…
You will also still be able to combine those notes to a longform both in Obsidian and Zettlr, as well as Foam for VSC with some of the addons or built-in feature in some software…
I use this type of structure for all my research, and mirror the structure I use in Zotero, the md file “vault” (Obsidian), etc.
Another great thing about this is that you can create a complete mindmap of your folder structure in Freeplane or create a network graph of it in the network graph software Tulip…
I know this is tools not many writers use, but for historical researchers and genealogists those can be powerful tools…
Same if you are a “based on a true story”-writer, you may want to separate the true story evidence from your “fiction” items etc.
Even though it is not a “modern” way to do stuff, a folder hierarchy is a really powerful way to store information when you want a clean and easy way to find “things”.
But of course, not everyone needs it, so it should be configurable, e.g. a checkbox “use as folder hierachy type” or a select list…
- Folder hierachy (sub folder of “YYYY-MM-DD”)
- Header 1 through 6
- YAML key
- Relation as wiki link
this is just some I picked from my head… could be done multiple ways…
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Hi @AeonRob that all sounds very promising. It’s good to know that 3.5 will be bringing text export, and to both Word and Markdown. That feels like Aeon is making huge strides to accommodate users who aren’t writers, as well as writers who may not use Scrivener or Ulysses. I shall look forward to the beta when it releases and to playing around with the text export functionality and seeing how it all fits into my workflows
Thanks for the update.
Andrew
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This is the bane of every development project ever! II’ve worked as a project manager for the last 15 years in product development, and I’ve only seen two or three projects deliver on the original timeframe. There is no solution to this, if there were a solution, some company would’ve already found and implemented it. IMHO, the best solution for a project like this is to have regular updates, and the update should come even it if its “no news”.
My subscription/payment expired early this summer, and I am waiting just as you mentioned for the new version before I buy/renew it. 
I think that could make thing very complicated, and still not fulfil everyones expectations. I think a better solution would be to supply documentation of the file format or allow for an automated export (e.g. AppleScript command, command line parameter etc.) in a well defined format, YAML, CSV or whatever. Then there could a plugin cottage industry popping up…
They already have something similar for the CSV export… or at least had it…
And no, it’s not complicated, it takes some work, but it is not complicated… you can actually ask MS Copilot to do it for you with Python and QT or GTK…
Are you thinking about the CSV import dialog? There you need to tie each column to an Aeon data field.
I would believe that the dialog of such an export could become quite complicated, there would be quite a few options, and there would always be someone asking for a new option or if an option could be changed, and then the code to handle all combinations… Since everyone’s workflow is so different I think it would be more efficient use of the team’s efforts to have them do as I proposed, and then everyone can apply the brain of their choice to get the resulting file into whatever workflow they use.
Thanks, Rob! I’m really looking forward to the release, and will help as much as I can as a beta-tester!
I understand stuff happens, and I hope everyone is doing well.
Try to focus on the solution, not the problems — and stop arguing just for the sake of it!
There is nothing complicated with a manual configuration that can be saved to a JSON mapping file and reused both for import and export = sync.
A fixed configuration isn’t going to work for everyone, because people use Aeon in very different ways. If an entity in Aeon gets exported as “X”, there will be plenty of users who actually need it as “Y” or “B” — and converting it manually becomes an enormous task.
For example, I have over 30,000 objects in one of my research Project in Aeon and Obsidian. If all of them get exported as “Y”, “B”, “Z”, but I need them as “Z”, “Y”, “B”, the export becomes completely useless. Reconfiguring that volume would take an unreasonable amount of time — and in cases where it’s meant to be a sync, it won’t work at all if you change a YAML key into a header or keyword.