


                        Design Guidelines
                        -----------------


First and foremost rule: "Just start writing" - when you open the editor,
you can start writing your story immediately, just like opening a notepad. No
need for any kind of setup.

The "magic" comes later.

- - -

There are basically two worlds of text editors:

1) Notepad, office word, google docs and similar: These are editors which
handle the text as one single bunch. They assume that if you want to split
the text, you will create several files (as we do when making software),
and those files are compiled together externally.

This group generally lacks the ability to split the text to manageable
pieces, which becomes a problem when your story is like 80,000 words. As an
example, you can not move chapters in the index view in google docs
or office word. Plain text editors don't even have an index.
   
2) ywriter and similar: These editors are designed for writers, and they are
based on text splits, usually named scenes.

These editors are often more like a email client. You have a list of scenes
(c.f. list of conversions) at left side, and you have editor box at right side
to edit the scene you chose.

These editors usually have limited possibilities to edit your text "as is".
You basically edit it block by block, and switch the block from index.
Most of these editors can "print" you a draft of your entire text, but that
draft is usually not editable. When you are reading it and find an error,
you need to go back to actual editor, locate the block that had error, fix
it and print out the new draft.

- - -

Moe aims between these two worlds. As far as possible, I try to keep the "draft
view" the main view to edit your story. As far as possible, this draft view
tries to be close to what you get when you export the text as RTF or similar
to be sent to your publisher or editor(s).

Draft view is where you start writing - many writers first start they story
in notepad or alike, until it has grown too large, and they start editing it
with other tools (like scrivener).

Draft view is where you end your writing, when reading your final version,
making small changes and fixing typos.

That's why I like to keep it as central part. Moe starts as notepad-like
editor, and it ends like notepad-like editor, and between those you have tools
to view your story from different angles.

- - -

"All tools are applied only until you need them."

Most stories get their "initial" shape pretty quickly. You have an idea of
a character, or how it starts, how it ends, or what is the turning point. You
might have idea where it happens, or when it happens. For most stories, you
can write initial sketches with notepad or office word.

But when the text grows, you start needing more tools to keep the text mass
organized. If you consider a 300-500 page novel, it can be hard to edit the
content alone as as big bunch of text. Now, when you consider that most novels
have lots of "meta" text - plans, sketches, background studies and such -
keeping track of all of them can be painful with regular text editors.

We need to be able to develop the story in more manageable pieces. We need to
be able to store meta data (plans, ideas, design, synopses) with the text,
and we need to have tools to use that data in meaningful ways.

To implement this without breaking the first rule, all these things will be
done later when the story grows. Step by step you start splitting text to
smaller pieces and add plans and sketches. At some point you may need synopses
as guiding lines when writing a chapter. But all this, it is made afterwards:
no need to make preparations and setups until you think you will need a tool.

(The difficult thing is to weave the pieces of the story so that it goes through
the initial idea. Close all writers do not lack ideas: they just lack ideas for
those small things tieing certain pieces together. This is why you need to be
able to look your story from multiple directions.)

- - -

LIMITATIONS

The limitations to story size are not technical. They come from the design of
GUI elements, how they are organized in the view, and so on. If the story grows
too large, the GUI just starts to feel clunky and laborous - listboxes are too
long, it is hard to get overview of the story from the views, and it becomes
harder and harder to find the pieces and organize them.

Let's say that initially the editor is designed for stories up to around
50-80 scenes, split to around 15-25 chapters and 3-5 parts. Depending on the
writer's style, it is something around 300-500 pages, and 50,000 to 100,000
words.

If you are working in multi-novel serie, with this editor it is meant to be split
to separate books, and use both integrated project manager and external documentation
to keep track of your work.

We will integrate project manager to the editor. Initially, project manager
mainly serves linking short stories together, but we might later add tools to use
it to manage multipart novel series.

Basically later additions for longer series would include more tools for resources
shared between stories, for example character and world descriptions and plans
and such. In fact, these are most probably first tools we anyways need in the
editor and project manager: I personally need ability to have "shared tags", as
many of my stories share the same background world, some characters and such.

- - -

OTHER DESIGN GUIDELINES

"Writers work with keyboard" - As much as possible, it would be great to be
able to use tools with keyboard, without needing to use mouse. Mouse is of
course good tool when you are trying out the editor, but later you would like
to use keyboard commands.

Some other design guidelines:

- "WYSIWYG": As far as possible, make it look just like what you get when
  printing it out.
  
- Views: What writer needs most is ability to view her/his story from multiple
  angles. You need to have different views to the story, and in each view, you
  should be able to modify it directly.

  Viewing story from multiple view points is more important than you
  first think. Just like a sculptor, you will be turning your subject
  to different angles to be able to sculpt it at one point.

- - -

MINIMIZE DISTRACTIONS

Writers tend to be tempted to use their time to fiddle with all sorts of
things irrelevant for the story itself. They can spend hours just
trying to find the perfect font, the perfect export layout, the perfect
size of the writing canvas, perfect settings and such. And they are never
entirely satisfied, but do it again next day.

One main guideline is that moe is not a layout or typesetting editor. Most
probably, you:

1) Cant change the fonts. You just cant.

2) Cant change the justifying.

2) Cant change the draft layout.

In general, moe will most probably have very limited configurability.

Of course this leads to problems. All writers work slightly different ways.
All writers are used to slightly different tools, and have slightly different
expectations to their tools.

But in reality, we can't go that way. In the end, moe is an editor you either
use, or use it not.
