Changing Categories

[Sarai]

Hi. I'd like to share a bit of what I'm doing and pose some questions that popped up as I advanced.

First of all, I am not using Realm Works for gaming. I'd been looking for a good database to organise my writing material but even the best writer-oriented databases never worked well with my methods. And then I stumbled upon RW and it turned out it was (nearly) exactly what I was looking for.

That said, the Individual category was far too simplistic for my purposes so I started changing it. Initially, I just hid what I didn't want and created new stuff. But the end result wasn't satisfying, so I erased some of the hid stuff and broke, for example, the 'appearance' tag-snipper into several more detailed ones.

Then my sister pointed out a hard truth: even though I'm writing, I'm first of all creating a world which can easily be transformed into a game (I did some gaming back in the pre-Internet days, however the folks who played were into games I never cared about so I dropped it... but the bug for gaming remained). Now, the detailed snippets I created aren't needed for playing, just to keep tabs on my writing and descriptions. So I created the category 'character' and was trying to restore the 'individual' category to its original state. That way I could keep the heavily detailed info for my writing in one place and keep the (simplified) info for gaming in another place. Unfortunately that place has been tampered in a way other users will never recognise...

So. Is there a way to 'reformat', so as to lose all the changes and return the 'individual' category to the basic?

[Sarai]

Still, in connection to changes to categories...

In the new category I created, I added several snippets with tags. The tags are all in Portuguese, a language which tends to have quite longer words in relation to English. And I find that, when I am creating new characters and assigning them tags (two to five tags per snippet), longer words are broken in half. This is particularly frustrating because some words are impossible to guess from their beginning (similar to guessing if 'interes...' stands for interested or interesting).

Is there a particular reason why the longer words get truncated? What can I do to avoid it?

[Zaphod Beebledoc]

Originally Posted by Sarai

Still, in connection to changes to categories...

In the new category I created, I added several snippets with tags. The tags are all in Portuguese, a language which tends to have quite longer words in relation to English. And I find that, when I am creating new characters and assigning them tags (two to five tags per snippet), longer words are broken in half. This is particularly frustrating because some words are impossible to guess from their beginning (similar to guessing if 'interes...' stands for interested or interesting).

Is there a particular reason why the longer words get truncated? What can I do to avoid it?

As far as this goes, I believe if there are more than a few tags, they will only show the first 10 (?) characters. You can give each tag a shorter name for just this occurrence.

[davidp]

Originally Posted by Zaphod Beebledoc

As far as this goes, I believe if there are more than a few tags, they will only show the first 10 (?) characters. You can give each tag a shorter name for just this occurrence.

It actually shows the abbreviation for the tag... But if there is no abbreviation, Realm Works creates an abbreviation from the first ten characters. So you can keep your long names and then also define a meaningful abbreviation.

[Sarai]

Thanks for the answers. I had been trying to save time and ignore abbreviations. I'll create abbreviations that include the last letters of the words so that I can understand what they stand for. Or find shorter synonyms.

Originally Posted by Zaphod Beebledoc

As far as this goes, I believe if there are more than a few tags, they will only show the first 10 (?) characters.

I tested out to see how many 'a few' were, and it turns out that as soon as you get two tags in a snippet, they get abbreviated.

[Sarai]

I'm still working on creating the perfect 'character' category for my needs. In the meantime, I started inserting characters to test how it all works together and I came to a realization: when you choose multiple tags, they show up alphabetically instead of in the order you pick them.

This turned out to be a problem because my characters often have more than one title (e.g., Infante Dom) and they must be in a precise order, which isn't alphabetical. I'm working around it by creating composed titles, but that's going to amount to a rather long list. It would be much better if the tags were visible in the order you pick them.

Hmm... Should I be posting this in the feature requests?

[Vargr]

Originally Posted by Sarai

Hmm... Should I be posting this in the feature requests?

Why not? I can see situations where I would like to decide the order of my tags.

Maybe a possibility to drag your tags into the order you want? The same way as you can do with snippets.

When I got Realm Works I quickly thought, that it must be a great tool for writers. Interesting that you are using it for that.

[Viral Platypus]

When you are managing your tag domains, you want to click on the 'tools' button ie Content Pane Options. The select 'Turn on Explicit Ordering'. You can drag the tags into whatever order you want.

[Vargr]

Ahh - nice tip. Thank you.

[EightBitz]

Originally Posted by Sarai

So. Is there a way to 'reformat', so as to lose all the changes and return the 'individual' category to the basic?

I don't think there is. At least, there isn't a way that I've found. The only advice I would have to give here is to create a new realm. Then you'll have everything back in its default state.

After that, you can make copies of the categories you want to modify, and you can do whatever you want to those copies. If you ever want to start over, you'll still have the original, unmodified category that you can recopy.