Help With Connected Text

Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 6, 2012 at 11:17 PM

Daly de Gagne wrote:
>Essentially what I want to do is
>to have authors and info related to them, and then have quotes from my various authors
>arranged as to themes - but am unsure how to set up the links so everything is most easily
>accessible. Am thinking categories might be best way to deal with the themes - or
>not.

There might be more people on the CT forum who could advise you on this, in case you want to repost your question there. I’m just a beginner, so I’d use Categories for what you describe: categories for the authors and the various themes. I’m aware that there are also Properties and Attributes, but I didn’t have to use them yet.

>If I use categories am thinking to have the word theme in each category or simply
>a T, in case for other reasons I want to use the word denoting the theme for a category
>unrelated to quotes.

I wonder if that’s necessary, given the various features in the Category pane. The tree view for example allows you to build a hierarchy of categories, which is a way of grouping them. And then for displaying the topics in the given categories, you have the option to look for Union (all topics with all the categories selected) or Intersection (topics that must have all categories selected). Also, you can rename categories later, and add as many categories to a topic as you like. So you may not need to mark the theme categories with a T.

>I do feel overwhelmed by all the info a/b CT - and though I
>realize much work has gone into creating the help info still feel there’s something
>lacking for ppl like me who seem not to have a natural understanding of how wikis work or
>possibilities they offer.
> >This weekend I plan to spend a couple of hours doing
>nothing other than exploring CT.
> >Any help or suggestions you or others can offer is
>much appreciated.

If you haven’t done this yet, I found it helpful to go through every single command in the pull-down menus and see what they do. Especially the View one seemed important, as it contains all the main tools of the software, which allow you to construct your own workspace and workflow. Only after I understood these could I begin to come up with the arrangement that particularly suited the task I wanted to use CT for. You can actually save your optimal desktop arrangement, so it’s preserved (in fact you can save several desktop versions). It all depends on what you want to do with it, how big your monitor is, and how many monitors you are using.

For example, I have Table of Contents docked on the left, so I can always see the outline of the document I’m working on. If I’m annotating, I have the Notes pane docked to the right. If I’m adding categories to my topics, I may have the Categories and the Topics panes docked on the right next to each other. The topic’s window is in the middle. I usually have the Navigator window open on a second monitor to my right, as it helps me visualise the hierarchical relationship between various topics that I linked together.