It’s hard to remember the initials of all my characters for my novel, making the character icons in views such as outline view less than ideal. One idea is to produce a tooltip with the character’s name when hovering over the icon.
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Hi @SCN I also picked up on this in some more detail in the post Inconsistent treatment of pop up Compact Display info. It could really do with improving in the upcoming betas, but I didn’t see any mention of it receiving any attention.
Andrew
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I think your suggestion with the tooltips is good and worth supporting.
What a cast! Do I really count 47 characters? How will your readers keep track of them?
The year before last I read “War and Peace”, where the appendix lists 35 main characters. Of course, it’s a bit more challenging with Tolstoy because each character has several variants of first names and nicknames.
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@Peter_T, this is my first novel, and I’m only half-way through the first draft. For a moment there I thought I had made a horrible mistake! 
I have one main character, the focus of my third-person limited POV. The rest are supporting characters. I’m writing a fantasy novel set in a magical world. I plan to write at least three novels in the series, but I have outlined seven, so I may continue with all seven.
A wildly popular fantasy seven-novel series also set in a magical world has 772 characters. Source: List of Harry Potter characters - Wikipedia. I won’t be introducing characters at this rate for the rest of the novel and series. But let’s say I did; that would be 47 characters x 2 (covering the second half of the first novel) x 7 = 658 characters. I’m still short of the number of characters in the Harry Potter series!
I’m breathing again! 
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Sounds pretty sporty. So your Aeon Timeline project guarantees that diehard fans won’t find any inconsistencies at the end?
I also created such collections of characters years ago (the organization chart of a fictitious company, the crew members of a frigate). In retrospect, however, I have to say that it didn’t help to bring the story to a close, rather the opposite.
I now have doubts as to whether I should even bother tracking my characters through the story. The technical requirements are of course met in my writing program, not to mention Aeon.
Where it makes perfect sense, of course, is the “whodunit” example of Murder on the Orient Express.
For consistency’s sake, AT is helpful, though I have moved my project to Obsidian and find it has many advantages for tracking characters (and everything else). Here is my usual writing configuration for Obsidian, though I have considerably more story information at my fingertips. What I like is that I can define pretty much anything I want to track.
Ah yes, I do recall having this seen before. Impressive.
For my part, I prefer a more conventional writing environment with OpenOffice and a home-made novel management software, which for me combines the best of yWriter and Scrivener, including Aeon 2 synchronization.
However, I watched Brandon Sanderson’s lectures on fantasy writing on YouTube, and what he said about the “world building disease” gave me a lot to think about.
Sanderson’s lectures are great. I am too new to know if I have the world-building disease or any other, haha.
It’s cool that you have found the apps that work best for you. I admit that I am unsettled about the apps to use. I find AT combined with Scrivener extraordinarily powerful, and in the last few days, I have been thinking about returning to this synced combo. But for now, Obsidian seems to give me what I need for almost anything I can think of (I wish it would provide a visual timeline as cool as the AT Subway view). I suspect that once I’m through my initial draft, I’ll move it back into AT/Scrivener. We’ll see, I guess.
Well, if you’re happy with your Obsidian system, why change horses again?
I have to admit, I’ve tried every piece of writing software I could get my hands on, and to get to know them better, I often programmed some tools and converters for them. In the end, I wrote my own software, which is probably the ideal solution for me. But the time required for this is of course immense. I would recommend world building instead.
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You are absolutely right. It’s probably a good thing I don’t have your programming chops. I could see myself building my own app, for sure.
I imagine that now that you have your ideal solution, the payoff is that you can focus on your writing. Dare I ask? 
Great idea. Why didn’t I come up with it myself?
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