Manually creating a link?

[Areinu]

I have a campaign that is lead in Polish Language. In Obsidian Portal, or any other wiki I could have created links on my own, which was great if the linked item didn't have exactly the same name as when it appeared in the text.

Polish language is constructed in the way, that makes something like that occur VERY often. The software is not able to detect links based on similar words, so I have to create them manually.

Example:
I have entry "Roześmiany Goblin" (rough translation of Laughin Goblin from Forgotten Realms. And also "Ren o' the Blade", who worked at that Inn. It's "Ren od Ostrza". So when I edit "Ren od Ostrza" entry I want to write:

"He worked in Laughin Goblin". In English it's not a problem, since the Inn has the same name when said in this content. But in Polish it becomes "Pracował w Roześmianym Goblinie". See, how "Roześmiany Goblin" is suddenly "Roześmianym Goblinie".

I don't expect you to code automatic detection of things like this(but it would be nice, and it's possible, but it requires a bit of lingistic knowledge and a lot of work). Problem is I can't create the link manually.

In the example above I still could fix it by writing "Pracował w tawernie Roześmiany Goblin" which translated to "He worked in Laughin Goblin Inn". But there are many situations where it either won't be possible or will be very strange in writing. For example if I wanted to write that heroes killed Ren o' the Blade most natural would be:
"Zabili Rena od Ostrza" (which won't be found because it's Ren od Ostrza in db). If I wanted the link I have to write "Zabili osobę zwaną Ren od Ostrza" which means "They killed a person named Ren o' the Blade". It's very unnatural, and when a lot of people will appear in one sentence or paragraph it will quickly get crazy. Imagine writing something like:

"And the person named Ren 'o the Blade met up with person named Nancy Drew with whom he journeyed to place named Mountain of Doom to defeat evil overlord with name Saruman". Strange, isn't it? And probably real world examples would be crazy, not merely strange.

 

[rob]

You should be able to do this readily. Highlight the text you want linked. Right-click on it. A menu should appear including the option to create a manual link. Create the link.

Is that not working for you?

 

[Parody]

If the alternate language constructions aren't going to be confused with other Topics/Articles, add them as Other Names for their Topic/Article in the new Manage Names dialog. Then they'll link automatically. It's no different than handling plurals in English.

 

[rob]

Excellent suggestion!

 

[MNBlockHead]

I second Parody's suggestion. Manually creating links is not fun. The auto-linking is one of RW's most useful features.

I've created topics that no only have different variants of the name to account for grammar, nicknames, and alternative names, but also multiple languages (translations of the topic name), simply by adding variants as other names (aliases). With the recent updates, you have even more control over linking.

I can see no reason why you couldn't accomplish autolinking with the examples you provide above.

 

[kbs666]

I messed around for a little while with using a language like Latin, nouns would have multiple declensions that change spellings depending on usage, for place names in a realm. It did require adding in the alias for every one but otherwise it works fine. The problem was I kept forgetting to do it myself in my writing.

Looking into Polish it looks like it does declension in much the same way Latin does. So that should work as well although it is fairly tedious.

Getting the parser to detect the base words with all the possible cases is exactly the sort of thing software is good at but takes a while to write. Writing one to handle any arbitrary language both existing and made up might be beyond the scope of this project though.

 

[Areinu]

I didn't know the software could detect links also from aliases, so that's a workaround. Tedious, frustrating and boring workaround in application that is supposed to make world maintaining easier and less tedious.

Good software should allow users to accomplish the same tasks trough multiple paths. I agree that manual linking is no fun and it's one of the strengths of this software, but ability to make manual links when necessary would get rid of many other problems. Design of this software is very close minded in some areas, for example no printing because creators want you to use the software during session and reveal the items to players.

I don't know latin, but with Polish I have to go trough 7 forms of the word. Also, the Polish has different words for feminine, masculine and neither version of the word. The neither won't be used in some cases, but often feminine and masculine forms will be needed. That means I have to create 14 aliases per entry. So until entry is mentioned at least 14 times I have to do more work for auto-linking to work then I would have if I decided to link those entries manually. There might be entries in db that also have synonyms, which I would like linked as well. That means I have to create another 14 aliases for each synonym. It's like writing a dictionary, not maintaining word.

This also creates some other possible problems: performance might get worse. If there will be one thousand of topics I will have 14,000 aliases, so auto-linker will have much more words to compare to. If there will be 14 aliases for an article and I will want to add a synonym it will be lost because of all the other forms.

What I will do will probably look different. Unless I know I'll be mentioning the entry a lot I will only put base word. If I mention it somewhere and need to use different form I'll go back to entry and add it. Then I'll go back to mentioning article and make a change to redo automatic linking.

But wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to do that? The app could let me highlight some text, press right mouse button, choose "link this phrase to a topic". This would popup the topic selection window, where I would choose what I want linked. When I do that the software can add an alias for linked topic, so in the future this phrase will be recognized by automatic linker. The flow could obviously be a bit different.

 

[Parody]

I didn't know the software could detect links also from aliases, so that's a workaround.

That is their main purpose. :)

When I [add a link manually] the software can add an alias for linked topic, so in the future this phrase will be recognized by automatic linker.

Adding a checkbox to the link dialog to create an Other Name sounds like a great thing to suggest in the Feature Requests forum. Perhaps you could add to this thread on plurals; even though in English changes to nouns aren't as common, plurals and occasional other forms require them.

Otherwise, any better handling for word forms may only be tackled as part of an internationalization effort for the entire application. The difficulty comes from not knowing the rules; grammar checkers only go so far. There's also not knowing how to handle made-up languages, which show up in campaigns more often than in your standard office document.

Aside: I miss the term Alias.

 

[kbs666]

It seems that they should be able to do that. I use ctrl-Q all the time to create new topics. A similar shortcut should be doable to say that a word should be added as an alias to an existing topic.

BTW the 7 forms of nouns with male, female and indeterminate forms stuff is also in Latin. Handling multiple declensions well should be part of a good I18N parser at this point. But if LWD is rolling their own parser it could really be too big a job. I've written parsers for HTML and they are tricky beasts.

 

[rob]

So the hard question that needs to be answered is how important something like this is relative to things like calendars, journals, export, printing, individual player reveal, etc. It's easy to declare something as important. Heck, virtually EVERYTHING is important in one situation or another. The truly difficult challenge is deciding which features are more important than others when there's a long list of things that users want added.

 

[AEIOU]

As kbs666 notes, this could be a rather deep rabbit hole that benefits a small segment. But it would most definitely open the product to a much wider international audience and that small segment could grow exponentially as a result....

This change wouldn't benefit me so my selfish choice is add it to the 2018 to-do's. But I can definitely see how it would be a really strong strategic choice. Glad you have to make the decisions and suffer the fallout rather than the rest of us, Rob.

 

[kbs666]

I'll put on my project management hat for a moment,

This is an I18N, L10N issue and I've learned through hard experience that the days of software projects being able to ignore those are over. The problem is you can't simply plug in a 3rd party parser to do the job. However a parser that can detect English plurals should be able to detect more complicated declensions, plurals are a form of declension, with some additional coding and perhaps some user input.

For instance polish nouns appear to follow the same general pattern in how the cases are formed so once the base word is known the other forms could be generated, more or less automatically, possibly based on a file specifying the various suffixes. This would allow both real world languages and within certain parameters made up languages to function.

The question is, would the work to do this be worth it? How many of us really find putting in the odd plural or alias that problematic? How many languages are troublesome like Polish? That I really don't know but from my own experience inputting English plurals haven't been that big a deal so I would certain put a major refactoring of the parser as a lower priority than the calendar, export and the Content Market.

 

[MNBlockHead]

But wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to do that? The app could let me highlight some text, press right mouse button, choose "link this phrase to a topic". This would popup the topic selection window, where I would choose what I want linked. When I do that the software can add an alias for linked topic, so in the future this phrase will be recognized by automatic linker. The flow could obviously be a bit different.

I'm confused. You can do this. That's what Rob's first post was referring to. The other responses after that were more along the lines of, yes, you can manually create links, but suggested that adding other names would be more convenient.

You've explained why it might not be more convenient to create multiple other names than to manually create links. Okay, fair enough. Not only can you manually create a link but you can manually create a links AND have the option of creating the custom link for all instances of the selected text.

See the following screen shots. Highlight some text and right click on it and you get the following context menu:



If you select the option to create a new custom link or to create a custom link for all instance, you get a dialog box that allows you to select any topic, article, or storyboard in your realm.



So it seems to me that you do have multiple paths.

As for updating the parser to support word inflections, I think it should be a low priority. While it would be a nice feature, unless it is a fairly minor development effort, there are many features that need to be completed first. I can manually add "other names" to a topic or articles, but have no way to create a custom calendar, convenient or otherwise. I have no way to print or export content, convenient or otherwise. I have no way to copy my realm or give it to someone else to use in their campaign. I have no way to buy cool content and easily integrate it into my realm.

There are a whole lot of very important features that we just do not have yet. I can live with manually adding other names or manually creating a custom link now and then.

Also, I wonder if having the autolink parse for word inflections may have unintended results. Maybe I don't want to automatically link all the declensions for words in a topic/article title. Then I would need another check box in the names options to state whether I want RW to automatically detect all variants of the words.

 

[Teresa]

I'd also like to suggest simply using the root of the word - I know this is possible in latin, although it can give multiple matches in some cases.

For example:
1) Latin dictionary form: dominus, i -> domin is entered as alias
2) Latin dictionary form: nox, nocti -> nox and noct are entered as aliases

At least you don't have to enter a whole lot of variants.

 

[Vargr]

Could the linking system be changed slightly so the following is possible:

As an Alias (following the above Latin example) you could insert "domin" and check "as part of word" (this is the new part).

Then whenever domin appears as part of a word (domin, dominus, domini) it will make a link.

I think this would (at least in part) help our Polish friend and it would help in a number of other languages.

Of course it shouldn't matter if the short form starts the word, ends it or is in the middle.

I have no idea if this is easy to make or if it would require hours and days of programming, but I think it could be useful to have - but for me, not on the cost of other features we wait for.

 

[kbs666]

Could the linking system be changed slightly so the following is possible:

As an Alias (following the above Latin example) you could insert "domin" and check "as part of word" (this is the new part).

Then whenever domin appears as part of a word (domin, dominus, domini) it will make a link.

I think this would (at least in part) help our Polish friend and it would help in a number of other languages.

Of course it shouldn't matter if the short form starts the word, ends it or is in the middle.

I have no idea if this is easy to make or if it would require hours and days of programming, but I think it could be useful to have - but for me, not on the cost of other features we wait for.

This is basically an extension of the plurals linking feature that is in the pipeline. If the linker can identify that a word has "s" or "es" at the end it can simply identify the word no matter what wraps it. It may have to check for verification but that is the default behavior anyway.

 

[Areinu]

I'm confused. You can do this. That's what Rob's first post was referring to. The other responses after that were more along the lines of, yes, you can manually create links, but suggested that adding other names would be more convenient.

You've explained why it might not be more convenient to create multiple other names than to manually create links. Okay, fair enough. Not only can you manually create a link but you can manually create a links AND have the option of creating the custom link for all instances of the selected text.

it seems the feature is already in, I just was using it wrong. I'll check at home, but it seems the difference is I was trying to highlight the text that was in edit mode, while you have highlighted text that is not. In edit mode I had only cut/copy/paste options, which was why I didn't find the correct popup.

Could the linking system be changed slightly so the following is possible:

As an Alias (following the above Latin example) you could insert "domin" and check "as part of word" (this is the new part).

Then whenever domin appears as part of a word (domin, dominus, domini) it will make a link.

I think this would (at least in part) help our Polish friend and it would help in a number of other languages.

Of course it shouldn't matter if the short form starts the word, ends it or is in the middle.

I have no idea if this is easy to make or if it would require hours and days of programming, but I think it could be useful to have - but for me, not on the cost of other features we wait for.

That would really work well for most of the names! Little harder with multi-word names, but it would massively decrease number of aliases needed. Obviously without seeing the code we can never tell how big change that is If what kbs666 says is true then it would be great.

@Rest: As I mentioned in opening post, I don't expect the software to be able to work with strange grammar of different countries. If I was behind this project I would probably put it into backlog and put low priority on it. There's low impact(handful of users) and a lot of work. Probably years of work to make it work well. Probably more work than this whole application requires.

 

[rob]

it seems the feature is already in, I just was using it wrong. I'll check at home, but it seems the difference is I was trying to highlight the text that was in edit mode, while you have highlighted text that is not. In edit mode I had only cut/copy/paste options, which was why I didn't find the correct popup.

If that's true, it sure sounds like a bug to me. Please open a support ticket and report this, since you should definitely be able to establish links within Edit mode.

 

[MNBlockHead]

Works in edit mode for me.