A new OLD feature — linking TO selected text in target note

O how I’ve missed this feature since Tinderbox 4!

Many of the notes I create contain long passages of text, or at least more than a screenful. Often when I create a Footnote in an article, say, or a longish narrative, I want to be able to come back from the Footnote to the exact place from which I digressed, but neither basic link nor text link in TBX 6 or 7 can do this for me, and when I return I have to scroll around to find where I was.

If I export to HTML, I can make this work with target & id tags, but, um, WRITING in HTML isn’t nearly as easy nor as much fun as it is in TBX (except for this non-slight inconvenience). Any chance of my old friend coming back?

BBly

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I too am interested in navigating to a specific place in a Tinderbox note.

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This would be such a great feature. Is there any workaround to do this manually?

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I suppose simply typing qq, or something similar in the text would serve as a placeholder that you could return to. I don’t think there is a word in English that has qq in it, but it ought to be easy enough to find some form of letters that would do. Bit of a bodge job, I know, but it could work until there is something better.

I use to use internal links, as you can see on the screenshots, with the link parking space function. Very useful when I have to create internal links between two specific notes.

The OP was talking about having a link to a specific place in the TEXT, not a link to a note, which is nice, but not precise enough in some circumstances.

It is a feature I would welcome. I even struggle to find where I was in a hundred words of text, never mind several thousand.

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I think the desired feature is like HTML anchors:

<a href="#section2">Section 2</a>

<h2>Section 1</h2>

<h2><a name="section2">Section 2</a></h2>

Something like HTML anchors would definitely help. Is there a way to use HTML anchors in TBX?

Still, it would be even better if there would be a way to point to specific sections of $Text (without having to add an anchor). Given this feature, Tinderbox could perhaps even replace QDA software like MaxQDA or Nvivo :slight_smile:

Background: I frequently encounter rather long texts (legal documents, speeches and interviews) and now deal with this by splitting them into smaller pieces (via a script).

During my PhD years I used such a system (based on Notational Velocity and inspired by this article File System Infobase Manager. However, search in NV for specific markers could be automated (just enclose the marker with [] ). I’m looking for something similarly straight forward - a clickable link to section of text - in TBX.

See Tinderbox’s QuickLinks. Typing [[NoteName]] will yield a text link to the note named “NoteName”.

Yes and that is a helpful feature. But here I was looking for something else: an option to link to specific parts of a very long note. For example, say I’m interested in environmental aspects of the new Chinese urbanization program and would want a direct link to (and not from) the highlighted section in this screenshot. Is there a way to do this?

This is coming.

Still, long notes are a problem in other ways, too; agents, for example, can’t find specifically what you want when what you want is embedded in a long note. Tinderbox containers and composites let you break long notes into smaller parts.

Really looking forward to this, thanks!

I rarely use agents on $Text, but around what size of a note should I expect problems? 1000, 5000 or 10000+ words?

Tinderbox won’t have problems searching the notes… it’s just if you have a 10k word note that an agent finds, the agent won’t tell you where in the note matched its query.

Let’s suppose you have an agent that looks for notes that mention rapacity, greed, or corruption.

If you have the entire text of The Federalist Papers in one note, you will find that The Federalist Papers discuss corruption. But that’s not terrible useful.

If you have split these into individual papers, you’ll find that Federalist 8, 9 , and 10 mention corruption.

If you have split the papers into sections, you’ll be able to zoom right to this:

It happened but too often, according to Plutarch, that the deputies of the strongest cities awed and corrupted those of the weaker; and that judgment went in favor of the most powerful party.

Ok, I get the point - and this is one of the reasons I do split longer documents into many smaller notes and, for example, tag them individually. For the main container of all notes belonging to one article, speech etc I have an edict like this

$Tags=collect_if(children,$Prototype==“annotation notes”,$Tags);

Through this edict the main reference has all the tags of the notes within the container. This allows me to make an educated guess about the contents of a source but also to search for all particular notes with tags within containers.

Please forgive me, but an agent looking for

rapacity, greed, or corruption

would not find any note containing

It happened but too often, according to Plutarch, that the deputies of the strongest cities awed and corrupted those of the weaker; and that judgment went in favor of the most powerful party.

would it? Or is there a way to do “fuzzy” search? Meaning that “corruption” would also find “corrupted”?

I habitually stem verbs and participles in search queries, so I’d have reflexively searched for “corrupt”. But yes, more analytical natural language processing is coming.

Is it feasible instead of creating a footnote to create: simply a note from a highlighted word or phrase within the $Text of a note without the link-type note and note+?