Story and Mechanics Links

[Grey Mage]

Definitely a +1.

[gloranphile]

This is a great idea! +1

[Parody]

Things to consider:

1. It makes links less recognizable, diluting their meaning.

2. It's easy to end up with something that looks horrible even to those who are using the standard settings.

3. Vision issues (like color deficiency and needing high contrast) are more common than you think.


Personally, I wouldn't use this feature (both because of numbers 1 and 2 above and because I don't care about the difference in destination) and would revert imported text using multiple link colors to the default. But that's just me.

PS: Did you find all the links in #2?

[kbs666]

Once we can add styles to links we could easily do that to ourselves anyway and some people certainly will.

However having the ability to have different colors of links or maybe bold links for story and italic links for rules or something like that would be helpful for some realms.

[MNBlockHead]

For me, the ideal would be for topics to be clearly linked. They can be formatted as the current default. For mechanics, I would like the link formatting to be much more subtle. The main issue that I'm having with links is that many mechanics articles have names that appear quite commonly in text and the links get distracting. Not just articles like "day" and "hour" but also "STR" and even monster names like ghost. For now I don't take advantage of auto-linking because I it makes my text look bad with all the distracting links.

Instead I manually go through when I save and make a decision for each and every link. This is a chore.

With the new names options, I have use things like capitalization to make it easier but that is still a lot of work to set up and I have to think about whether a word I'm typing should be linked or not. I'm just taking the at-save chore and spreading it out while I type, distracting from the creative flow of writing.

Ideally, all my mechanics links could be in a shade of gray. Heck, I could even see having them formatted just like the surrounding text. Mechanics links are just a rule or dictionary lookup. Topic links, on the other hand, link items that are integral to the story, and understanding the encounter or scene. So I want the topic links to stand out.

[Vargr]

Deleted

[Vargr]

Could mechanics links simply have a dot after them?

Something along the lines of this:

The blacksmith, Gildar Ironsson, mentioned, that the Grappleorcº̐ is mainly observed in the dusk.

The blue and underlined would be link to the almanac. The symbol after Grappleorc would indicate the word Preceding it is a link to the mechanics reference.


Well, that was the best symbol I could come up with with this editor - I know, not really good...

When moving the cursor over Grappleorc the word (and therefore the link) could change colour to what-ever the link colour is.

[Vargr]

Oh, and the little silly symbol after the word linking back to the Mechanics Reference could be coloured as a link (blue) or some other colour to make it stand out a little (not too much).

[AEIOU]

Rather than the orange I used for demonstration, I'd personally prefer a medium grey with underline. It isn't obtrusive but is easily discernible should I need the reference.

@Parody: Some people like their colors, some people can't see all colors, some people hate colors. If my suggestion is implemented you are right that it needs to be configurable somehow. And ideally, if I import work you share to the Marketplace into my realm, I will have the option of using your formatting preferences or my own default.

@Vargr: I like your thinking and brainstorming. For me, the symbol would add another UI element to an already super busy screen. There is so much information for each entry. Knowing that all underlines are links is a simpler solution that doesn't require any thinking.

[Exmortis]

+1 love it!