Hi, I’m writing a book for a retired legislator and would like to see local and national items that form the political/historical context of his personal story. Is there a way to use the split screen feature to do this? I’m thinking of having all his personal events on one screen, with relevant (but not directly personal) political events on another split screen.
For example, one screen would show the timeline of him winning his first election and being sworn into office, while the timeline below would show who was the president during this time period, who controlled the House and the Senate, etc.
Any ideas? I’m guessing there’s a simple process but I’m new to Aeon and haven’t been able to figure it out.
Thanks in advance.
Yes you would be able to use split screen to show a timeline of his personal events on one screen, and historical events on the other.
The way to do this would be using Filters. You can use the filter icon on the sidebar to choose how to filter events on the timeline (eg. by event type, by relationship etc.) When you have a split screen view you can use separate filters on each view.
In your example, one way you could do this is create a “Character” or “Person” for the person you are writing about (either by clicking the plus sign on the sidebar, or opening the Character/People sidebar and clicking Create New) Depending on the template you are using (I assume maybe Fictional or Historical), the exact name of this entity type would be different.
Then you can add events to your timeline (such as the person winning his first election) and assign them to the event. If you click on the event and open the inspector on the left, if you click on the Relationships tab, you can then click on the plus sign next to the “Participant” to assign them as a participant in this event.
Once you have assigned this person as a participant to all the events they were in, you can filter using this person via the filter tab. Then you will only see events this person what involved in on the timeline.
In terms of historical events, you could either use tags, so in the Properties tab of the inspector add a tag to all historic events that says “historic” and then you could filter by this on a separate split screen. Or you could add a different event type called “Historic Event” in the advanced settings, and then filter by event type.
You can read about how to create split screens here: Desktop UI Overview - Aeon Timeline 3 Knowledge Base
You can read about filters here: Global and Local Filters - Aeon Timeline 3 Knowledge Base
This describes how to add characters to a novel: How To Track Characters in a Novel - Aeon Timeline 3 Knowledge Base. The same principle would apply you were using Person in the Historical template.
This explains about adding your own item types: How To Add Item Types - Aeon Timeline 3 Knowledge Base
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Thanks for the very good instructions! I’ve also found the Agatha Christie sample project helpful. This program is excellent.
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