I find that while building my world, quite often, I need to search through my articles to find out what I said and where I said it about a location, a character or anything else. So far this meant having a million tabs open on my browser and generally being driven insane and becoming more and more stressed.
Of course the solution would be to have those articles open on the same tab as the one I was, but that would have meant an even more cluttered and filled with “stuff” layout, when what I want is a clean and clear interface I can just “write”. It took some thinking but… I now have a solution for both me and hopefully you, enter the “Overlay”
What is the World Anvil Overlay
The overlay simply put is a layer of information on top of the normal interface that will only be in front of your eyes when you want it and only then. It’s activated by pressing Alt + Enter and it is hidden away exactly the same way. This means that I need something, I can open it up, check it and then close it down and continue working!
It might look a bit empty right now, having only one widget, but soon enough there will be many more widgets for you to choose to have loaded there and customize the way they work. Today we start with one of the most important ones, the Previewer.
The Previewer Widget
The previewer, as is in the name allows you to search through your articles, historical entries and stat blocks and preview them. That means, no more multiple windows and no more searching through those tabs to find the article you wanted. Simply press Alt + Enter (it will automatically focus on the previewer’s search) and type the name of the article, stat block or event and then click on the result you want to read through it (or edit it by clicking the edit button)
What is coming
Well it goes without saying that more widgets are certainly on the way
- World Anvil tags & Codex reference (as a way to quickly access help)
- Post-notes (selected notes from your notebook)
- Quicklinks (like an MMORPG quick tab but for pages on your world or the interface)
- Image Browser (Like the previewer but for images, or this can be incorporated into the Previewer)
There are my ideas. What is it that YOU need? Let me know in the comments below so I can read through them and plan accordingly
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Lately I’ve had at least 3 tabs open. dashboard to make new articles that are more than just a stub, for a stub I use the quick create. Articles list, because I forget to add a category. Last is the article itself.
Maybe adding a save and open in a new tab option to the quick create would help.
So great that you uses what you code for us!
Is todo available in the previewer.?
Ok, thought of one more. I have a generic world where all my common stuff goes. So generic creatures are all in there and I copy the @ link and paste it into whatever world I need it in. It would be great if I didn’t have to change worlds to look up the link. Maybe add an all worlds option to the overlay search and a way to copy the block/text links.
Link visualizer that shows which articles are linked to the one in-focus by so-many degrees of separation. Degrees vary by payment tier since that presumably is burdensome server-wise. I.e. 0/1/2/3
At the risk of sounding needy, things I would love to have are:
I really really need the ability to see ALL articles in an excel style format that I can sort and filter in a more condensed view than is currently offered. Even better would be enabling batch actions from this list like changing categories, tagging, access privileges (including public/ private), subtitle, etc. I would love to be able to edit the primary attributes available in quick content creation through this list also. If you want to be extra, then adding a “sources” column to this would be really handy to be able to monitor sourcing and see if something is missing at a macro view. I don’t want to be accused of plagiarism or anything, which is why almost all of my articles are private.
Sometimes if I have to make a change in the plot or story line, or change a portion of my world the most tedious thing is going into each article just to change small attributes.
Link visualization similar to the comment above by Alfredo Fernandez.
A way to control the to-do list and filter out stubs. Also enabling to-do list batch actions. Or just a separate creation to-do list for articles that have not created yet that isn’t muddled by the stubs would be awesome.
Being able to see what articles that images have been assigned to by hovering over them or something in the images and files tab. Sometimes I forget where I have used an image and don’t want to duplicate. Same deal with sourcing here. Being able to quickly tie a source to the image after it is added to the images and files tab would be huge, and make me more likely to open my world up to the public.
A “character viewer” toggle when previewing or viewing an article where I can see what each individual player in my campaign can see on a given page in both campaign and world mode. Nothing is worse than a “wait, I don’t see what you all are talking about” mid-game and losing momentum/ the players’ sense of awe while trying to figure out what permissions are off.
I love everything you all have done thus far. This platform is phenomenal. Thank you so much for helping me bring my world to life.
I am surprised at the amount of detail world anvil provides that allows the creation of a world. It’s great to have it all coherently organized and be able to so easily share it with others.
My one wish currently is that I like tables and organize alot of my thoughts in tables often. So alot of the work I do is tabular (think spell list, categories, etc). Therefore I am most interested in getting existing tables I had outside of world anvil into world anvil and thereafter working on them within World Anvil.
To this end it would be nice to have 3 things:
1) Ability to translate tables from html or csv to bbcode .
2) Interactive Tables seem amazing but have never been able to leverage them given the nature of the long text cells (with new lines, special characters, commas, etc) I wish to import.
3) Constantly editing multiple interactive tables or tables in bbcode is a non starter for me as it seems extroardinarily more tedious given alternatives of using google spreadsheets for example. So a way in which to easily work with tables in world anvil would be game changing to me.
Currently whenever i need tables the workflow is to go through hoops to get them into world anvil for read-only display purposes.
Keep up the hard work, we can all see the effort being put into this.