Hi Folks: I’ve been making some use of composites. When I use view → arrange → dance the composites are pulled apart.
Is this a known issue?
Thanks,
-mark
It probably is now—as in I’d not been surprised if those features had been explicitly tested together. ‘Dance’ re-arranges notes on the map and composites are a separate form of note clustering. So, two different dayout methods are working in opposition. A note can be removed or deleted from a composite so it isn’t a permanent structure
Are you assuming the Dance feature ought to treat a composite as if it were a single note?
Good point. I’d never thought about how Dance and composites should interact.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, and on composites generally.
Howdy:
To MarkA - yes, my naive expectation was that the composite is a permanent structure - at least when dancing. I often use transparent, pinned adornments to ‘group’ certain notes that I wish to stay together. This also doesn’t work with dance.
To MarkB, when I do use composites it is for ‘structured’ note taking. I find it easier to add content to composites in outline view. However, I cannot ‘add’ a composite in outline view which has me bouncing back and forth. I also find that I often break composites in map view. By this I mean that I inadvertently split a composite into one or more ‘sub-composites’. This seems to happen depending on which note I click on to move the composite. This is confusing. For example: if I use the built-in ‘lecture’ composite and try to move this by selecting ‘abstract’ the composite splits into 2, turns the shape of the ‘abstract’ to a ‘tag’, and ‘stacks’ it atop ‘note’ and ‘question’ … I can use undo to recover from this … in my example the abstract will get put back into place: but it will always remain a ‘tag’.
I realize that there are quite a number of subtleties involved with dance, adornments and composites. For dance it would be nice to have an option to honor pinning, smart adornments and composite groupings. For composites, it would be handy to be able to add them directly in map view. It would also be helpful if I could predictably move one perhaps by using the composite name as the handle?
Thanks,
-mark
I’m, *interested * in composites. They’re a (I suspect) good idea, wrapped in some semantics that might not be right. Dance and composites is not something I thought through, nor is there anything in the research literature that contemplates it.
Your proposals seem sensible!
Indeed, the combo begs more deliberate use of ad-hoc composites. Generally discussion I’ve seen has been of built-in composites or modifications thereof†. I suspect this partly reflects people trying to make sense of how they (individually) might use the features.
If Dance and Composites play together, it might be a lightweight way of ‘freezing’ parts of the map pre-Dance and then using Edit ▸ Break Composite to ‘unfreeze’ any such temporary composites. Not the original purpose of composites but, I think, a useful additional purpose in this narrow context. What I’m overlooking here is that, presently, composites are assumed to be a contiguous grouping and currently can only be instantiated from a pattern pre-created in /Composites. Note: the latter makes sense in their originally intended use).
†. That is not to say the feature doesn’t allow users to roll their own. doing such has been possible for introduction of the feature.