In Tinderbox 4 & 5, if I cut or copied text containing links from one note and pasted it in another, the links came along with the rest of the text. In this way, if I needed to quote a passage from an old note in a new one, I didn’t have to redo the links. Can I do this in TBX vv 6 & 7?
You can copy and paste notes, and the links will be preserved. We don’t copy links for in-text excerpts at present, both for efficiency and because the duplicated links are frequently unwanted.
I certainly appreciate the argument for efficiency in the program code, but as I’m writing, it hardly ever happens, when I Copy-Paste a passage of text with links, that I don’t want the links to come along with it, as they would in TBX 4 & 5 (which is where I picked up the habit). Any links I don’t want are easy to get rid of in the Browse Links… dialog — and, in vv 4 & 5, if I Cut (rather than Copy) the overlinked text in the destination note, I could then just Paste purified text back in!
Of course, I don’t know how links are encoded on the programming side, and probably can’t appreciate what would be involved in organizing this change, but I for one would be very grateful if I could do this again!
Text links are ordered by their anchor position in the $Text, so to change order, you need to alter the $Text. In Browse Links, basic links are first in the order of creation, then text/web links by order of anchor position.
Not time to test just now, but IIRC the trick is to copy the desired text (link and desired surrounding text) and paste it into the new position before then deleting the original. A little counter-intuitive as an approach but (if it still works) a workaround.
Now I want to move the second paragraph to the beginning. So I cut the second paragraph and paste it at the beginning. Or I copy the second paragraph and paste it at the beginning. This results in:
I can’t rearrange text within a note, unless I’m willing to lose the link.
And honestly, I can’t fathom this! Mark B has maintained his website with TB for how many years now? And you do aTbRef. Are you telling me that neither of you ever rearranges text in a note after adding links, or you always re-construct all the disappearing links after rearranging text? Both scenarios strikes me as incredibly unlikely, so I have to imagine there’s something I’m missing.
The article I was thinking of is here, but it is out of date. Drag-drop to other windows’ text pane or tear-off text windows in same or other TBXs now work. However, in all cases described on that page, link data is not transferred though I’m unclear as to when the copy process stopped supporting links.
I quite often remake links. A workaround if moving text past a section of text that doesn’t contain links is the move the latter rather than the former, so the text with links in it ‘moves’ by default.
And I wanted to reorder them, the solution as of today is to:
Click on each link to determine what note it links to
Note that info down somewhere
Reorder the lines to be what I want
Reconstruct each of the links
Am I the only one that thinks that’s insane?
I know @mwra and @eastgate both use links in their sites a lot… do you guys just never edit your text, or always go through that arduous process when you do edit your text?
If I have a list I know I might want to reorder, I put each item in separate notes and put those notes in a container. That lets me use all Tinderbox’s facilities – sorting, outline view, chart view, and all the rest – to work with the list.
Copying and pasting text links is tricky; if you keep the links, sometimes you need to delete the unwanted links, while if you don’t keep the links, sometimes you need to replace them. If I hadn’t expected to need to edit this list, and now I needed to completely revamp it, here’s what I’d do today:
Copy the current list, and paste an unlinked copy beneath the current list.
Edit the copy.
Recreate the links
Delete the old list
Or, if I want to add or remove items, I can do that in place.
Copying and pasting text links is tricky; if you keep the links, sometimes you need to delete the unwanted links, while if you don’t keep the links, sometimes you need to replace them
Well, I wouldn’t expect the links to disappear by default… on OS X, when you copy and paste rich text with links, the links stay. If you want to remove the links, you manually remove them. If it’s super common to do this, then maybe a “copy without links” or “paste without links” function makes sense… but throwing the links away violates a basic expectation of copy-and-paste.
If I hadn’t expected to need to edit this list, and now I needed to completely revamp it, here’s what I’d do today
That’s certainly a better workflow than I came up with, thanks @eastgate
I use Tinderbox for three significant (to me) HTML projects… two websites, and a personal wiki. I use text links all the time. Losing the links any time I rearrange text within a note is a major frustration for me. I really hope you choose to add this functionality back soon.
The goal is pretty simple: rearrange the text so that the notes are in alphabetical order.
(note: I’ve used an extremely simple example here to illustrate a point. In my real document, the notes are not neatly shown to the left, they’re buried in a long list of notes)
Here’s the process:
Click a note link to navigate to the note
Right-click and “Open in new tab”
opt+cmd+right arrow to navigate back around to the first tab
cmd+’ to “go back” to the note with the links
Repeat steps 1-4 for the remaining linked notes
Edit your text however you like
Select some text that should be-relinked, and drag the note’s link parking space to the document link parking space
Find the tab with the note to link to, and drag the document link parking space to the note icon
Repeat 7 & 8 for any remaining broken links
Obviously this is long-winded compared to cutting and pasting to rearrange the text… but so far it’s a worthwhile tradeoff to make given that Tinderbox can do things that are impossible in other tools.
I am catching up on this thread because I’ve hit upon a similar need to cut-and-paste text that contains links from Note1 to Note2. As I made my way through the thread, I was quite surprised in how complicated it seems.
I’m in the middle of a writing project and admittedly read through the posts quickly (“focus on creating content, not tinkering with the tool”, preaches my conscience). Based on a first-pass through the posts, setting up agents/deactivating agents, navigating links in new tabs – all seems so complex!
If votes are tallied for new features, please count my vote for a “Paste and Preserve Links” option – perhaps, it can be part of the Edit menu, like “Paste and Match Style”.
With regard to the idea that this is rarely encountered, I’m surprised by that too. I run into this problem quite a lot. In fact, it is more often the case that I want to preserve links in $Text.