Explode Action Question

So in I’d like my exploded notes to:

  1. Have no title
  2. Enlarge enough so that all the text is visible and legible in Map View.

For 1. I tried $ShowTitle=False , =0, and = – didn’t succeed. For 2. I wasn’t sure where to start…
Best to all - JM

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There isn’t an attribute $ShowTitle.

You might try setting $DisplayExpression to a space character. But Tinderbox really does prefer to have some name for each note.

I understand what you desire but you’re simply pushing against the gears. For instance, while you may make a note with no title, it doesn’t help you in terms of space as Tinderbox still reserves space to the title and subtitle:

In the same way you will still need to size the map icon by eye to see the text. If there is a lot of $Text, an auto-expend feature would produce ridiculously large note icons.

Whilst I appreciate what you wish to do it doesn’t use the UI in the way it was designed. You can view a note’s $Text other weays:

  • in the text pane
  • open a stand alone text window
  • as a Hover Expression (though this may clip the text if very long.

You do mention Explode, how long are the $Texts you are creating?

This implies $Name is not set, i.e. empty. Or did you actually mean to say you don’t wish the note’s name to be visible in Map view?

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Thanks as always for the get-back. I half thought it might be an uphill battle. Each of the exploded notes would have at most two paragraphs of text, and there wouldn’t be more than 20 or so notes at a time. I can always just enlarge them manually.

Sounds like I’m confusing $Name and $Title. Is $Title reserved for reference to a book or article and $Name for the “title” of a note? In the latter case, yeah I’m trying to have $Name not appear in Map view. My first thought was to have no $Text and just put all the text in $Name, but I figured that a) $Name might not hold two IP’s of text and b) that in terms of legibility I’d be better off having no $Name and all the text in $Text… I knew I wouldn’t be saving space per se, but as you gathered I was trying to avoid having the first sentence in the title or the first sentence in both the name/title and the text…

I should probably just think up a way to make use of the $Name attribute other than as a title per se… maybe some Zettelkaskin like ID system or some such, perhaps through $DisplayExpression… But for now, if for an explode action I just do $Name= , that will set the name/title area to blank?
Thanks again - JM

I breaks down like this:

The subtitle and caption are less used, but they are always available for use and Tinderbox allows some space for their use. There are also further system attributes various to change the size/colour/font/etc’ of the above, but that’s easy to read up on.

So, you’re really working with $Name (note title) and $Text (note body text). There is no $Title attribute.

Untitled 2021-02-16 17-27-57

Even if not used, you don’t control the space allotted on a map’s note icon for the $Name and $SubTitle.

Although Tinderbox will let you make a note with no $Name value, unless the notes are only short-term, this will bite you: e.g. how do you make a ziplink to a note with no $Name in a container with similar siblings? And, so on…

But we can hide the name by making it the special colour ‘transparent’ ($NameColor="transparent";). But, as Explode produces default size icons, this gets us to here, with no $Text showing as the icon’s too small:

So we adjust our $Width to 7 and $Height to 8($Width=7;$Height=8;)

Now we have text but, the lack of a title is confusing Tinderbox as to what colour to use for the body text. So, we set $MapBodyTextColor, from the default ‘automatic’ to ‘black’ ($MapBodyTextColor="black";):

Well, lets try making the title space a bit smaller. We’;; change $MapNameSize from the default 100 to 1 ($MapNameSize=1;), i.e. 1% of normal size. Tada!

So in your Tinderbox documents’s "Exploded Notes’ (built-in) prototype set this $OnAdd:

$NameColor="transparent";
$MapBodyTextColor="black";
$Width=7;
$Height=8;
$MapNameSize=1;

If you keep the notes, you may well want to set defaults for some of these. Here’s the demo

blank note test.tbx (92.4 KB)

Interestingly, before starting this I’d no idea if this was possible - no one has ever asked before. But I think we’ve got not too bad a solution.

. For a brief time in v5 system attribute ReferenceTitle was initially called Title before the ambiguity of the naming became apparent. Old docs that were opened at least once and saved using v5.10.0 may thus have a redundant system attribute Title. Ignore it if so!

. If you get the overall think working, you might be able to tinker with the attribute for the font size of the non-existent title/subtitle, but don’t expect to remove all the dead space at the top of th icon. Also there needs to be space for the badge ($Badge) at top right—even if not used (as it might be later).

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Perfect. Yeah, I got confused because I didn’t see that $ShowTitle was deprecated as of version 6 – on the contrary I got excited because I thought I’d cracked it ;).
This is great – I’ll keep you posted re progress. Best — JM

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