Viewing scenes on a timeline

[Peter T.]

A few years ago, I presented two auxiliary programs here for connecting yWriter projects to timeline applications: aeon2yw for Aeon Timeline 2 and yw-timeline for the free Timeline. With their help, it is possible to arrange the scenes of a yWriter project according to their narrated time and to change the times and duration in a convenient way.

 
For those who don't want to run a heavyweight timeline software, but are just looking for a way to quickly view their scenes arranged on a timeline, I have now written a new program, yw-tlview, which is a stand-alone viewer. The installation file for download is only 49 kilobytes in size, but you need a Python installation on your computer. 

It is the yw7-reading variant of a more extensive hobby project of mine.  

Have fun!

[Keith Brady]

Thanks for posting this, Peter - It looks useful! 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "yWriter" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ywriter+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ywriter/deb22eb7-0a97-411c-980a-f1a61854092dn%40googlegroups.com.

[Peter T.]

A German language pack is now available for the yw Timeline viewer. It sets the user interface language to German and assigns a German user guide to the help menu entry. 

[Peter T.]

Is there anyone out there using my yw7 Timeline viewer? Then don't miss the latest update. It comes with a small scale overview at the the bottom of the window. 

[KM Lafferty]

Hi Peter,

This is your own stand-alone program, yes? I wasn't familiar with it and it looks very useful (as your stuff generally is); but as I note to Simon below I don't use the yWriter day/date/time/duration feature because it's not workable for me although I'd love to be able to view my story on a timeline if it wasn't all so tedious as it is in yWriter.

For Simon:

Per above, I find yWriter's date and time system difficult to use.  It is not just the inputting of data that's time-consuming but the fact that if I drop a scene or chapter elsewhere or otherwise rearrange the timeline, I don't know how to change all the affected timelines other than to manually adjust the day/date + time + length for each and every following scene all the way to the end of the novel. 

I know In yWriter's Storyboard, scenes can be dragged around but there is no scroll bar at the bottom so I can only view a few cards and even then I'm not seeing any date/time ( I do only have 1 'character' in all my stories and that is N/A).  

Or there's the Display Scene list which is unfortunately view-only otherwise it would be very helpful to actually write my day/date/time/duration right into this list. 

My workaround is to write the week number & day at the end of the scene title (which still requires manually adjusting if the scene is moved and gives only basic information) but this can't be converted to a graphic timeline, of course. 

Am I right there is no other way to see scenes displayed on a timeline other than to use Peter's program?

KM

On Mon, 26 May 2025 at 22:20, Peter T. <peter.pape...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is there anyone out there using my yw7 Timeline viewer? Then don't miss the latest update. It comes with a small scale overview at the the bottom of the window. 

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "yWriter" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ywriter+u...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ywriter/318c10b6-d37e-4ffd-9dff-96b9efd0df48n%40googlegroups.com.

[Peter T.]

On Monday, May 26, 2025 at 9:21:37 PM UTC+2 KM Lafferty wrote:

[...] It is not just the inputting of data that's time-consuming but the fact that if I drop a scene or chapter elsewhere or otherwise rearrange the timeline, I don't know how to change all the affected timelines other than to manually adjust the day/date + time + length for each and every following scene all the way to the end of the novel. 

This leads us to a fundamental question, namely the difference between the the narrative sequence and the chronology of the plot. The dates of the scenes are linked to the relationship between cause and effect of the overall plot. On the other hand, you can arrange the scenes out of chronological order to achieve dramatic effects, for example through flashbacks or foresight. This shows that the dates of the scenes should be set deliberately, and that an automatic date/time adjustment in a scene rearrangement would not be a good idea.

In the first post of this thread, I linked to another utility, yw-timeline, which can be used to create a timeline file for a free third-party software. An event is created there for each scene. Events without a date are given a default date (the current date, unless otherwise specified in the configuration file). In the Timeline program, you can then conveniently arrange the events on the timeline and determine their duration by mouse dragging. 

You can then synchronize the yWriter project with the timeline to transfer the date and time information. This process can be repeated and the synchronization works in both directions. 

[KM Lafferty]

Hi Peter,

I can see what you're saying about the issue an automatic date adjuster would cause in a non-chronological novel. I mentioned yWriter's Display Scene List in my original post because when I saw the second screenshot on your timeline-view-tk page it made me think of the ease of viewing date/time/duration info in yWriter's Display Scene List and how useful it would be to have an interface in yWRiter where you could see all that at once and also adjust it there and then to suit.

You have mentioned your yw-timeline utility might be helpful, and in fact after my post yesterday I had gone looking on your github to see if  yw-timeline was still current. I must have missed seeing it; but I have now gone back and seen it there after all. I played around with yw-timeline in 2022 using a sample project and had a brief dialogue with you about it then but I wasn't sure I was committed to returning to formally dating & timing my novels after going without using that feature of yWriter nearly from the start because the effort (for me) outweighed the use value.  I have instead got my own method, being appending each scene title with the week and day; e.g. 'Week 6 Tuesday' and so on, which is basic but suffices for me, given my stories take place in fairly condensed timeframes of e.g. a few months, or just a few weeks. That would not be helpful for people writing, for example, years-long or generations long novels, or historically accurate events and times.

However, I must give yw-timeline another look now that I see you have a more recent version than the v1.2.4 I still have on my computer.  Am I right or wrong in remembering you told me that in Timeline one can use the Day 1, Day 2 etc. system?  I guess if this is not so, I could figure out something that suits me when I find myself too tired to write but too wired to sleep.

Thank you for reminding me of this useful utility of yours and I suggest anyone reading this post to have a look at yw-timeline if you want to view and edit the timeline of your yWriter story within a visual interface and then easily be able to port that back to yWriter.

KM

[Peter T.]

It's true, entering a date for every scene is tedious, and I save myself the effort or wait until the revision. In any case, it pays off the most if you also use a specialized timeline software. 

On the other hand, you can also make a complete plot outline with a timeline application if the course of the narrated time is particularly important, as in a mystery or a thriller with a “ticking clock” and changes of perspective. My utility programs such as yw-timeline and aeon2yw then turn this into a novel outline in yw7 format.  

However, I do not actively develop these utilities any further. As you can see in the changelog, with the last releases I have mainly reacted to updates of the Python interpreter by reworking deprecated code. There were also some workarounds to process yw7 files that were generated with the iOS version in the wrong encoding or that contained invalid characters. From time to time I also check whether it still works after updating the Timeline software, as file format changes are also possible there.

In terms of convenience when entering dates, an option in yWriter that generates a start date from the end date of the previous scene at the click of a button would be helpful. And an option that can determine the duration from the start date of the following scene. Of course, all this can also be solved with auxiliary programs, and I myself now use my own novel organizer, which can do all this.

Exporting the scenes with date/time/duration to a speadsheet in order to edit them and then save them back would not be too much effort in terms of programming, but the documentation and long-term maintenance would be too time-consuming.  

Speaking of documentation (which experience has shown that hardly anyone takes note of), for yw-timeline I have described how the date can be automatically converted to days when saving back to yw7 (and vice versa on export) if you select the corresponding option in a configuration file and specify a reference date. 

Cheers, 

Peter

[Simon Haynes]

Timelines have never been any use to me, because I write books in the far future or distant past and the Microsoft date picker thing doesn't handle either.

I added the feature years ago because someone asked, but it's not particularly useful imo.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "yWriter" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ywriter+u...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ywriter/2ff42c6f-d4ae-401a-b5cd-389793b0197an%40googlegroups.com.

--

--
Visit Spacejock Software, the home of yWriter, FCharts and more

Visit spacejock.com.au for my articles on writing and publishing novels.

[Peter T.]

On Tuesday, May 27, 2025 at 2:57:22 PM UTC+2 Simon Haynes wrote:

Timelines have never been any use to me, because I write books in the far future or distant past and the Microsoft date picker thing doesn't handle either.

I added the feature years ago because someone asked, but it's not particularly useful imo.

It depends. There are cases where chronology is important, for which I have given examples above. Then it can be very practical to include the date and time as metadata connected to the scenes. 

But there are of course simpler ways. The classic is manually maintained time tables, and recently there have been more and more plot tools with timelines. But it is just with these that practical problems often arise when the Gregorian calendar is not sufficient, but fantasy calendars are defined, or -- which has not yet been solved -- several calendars to be used in parallel for different places in the narrative universe. I see this in the Aeon Timeline user forum, where feature requests on this topic are constantly popping up.

Needless to say, my timeline-related tools are limited to the Gregorian calendar as supported by yWriter. If that is not enough, or is too inconvenient, the practiced solution of putting time information in free form in the chapter or scene description seems quite reasonable to me. The visualization can then be done somehow outside of yWriter, if necessary with pen and paper.

[KM Lafferty]

Thanks Simon, I didn't know the date/time was added only on someone's request which explains its limits and why it remains as it was in yWriter5 (and probably earlier).

Also to Peter, thank you for reminding me how to convert dates into days in yw-timeline, and for your explication of the issues with regards to timeline programs in this and your other post. As I am not a programmer, I hadn't appreciated the limit of the Gregorian calendar on the use value of timeline software, never mind the necessity of cross-feature maintenance in writing software with an embedded timeline feature.

KM

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ywriter/CAN0R%3DkQ9-qoS%2BjBjesBxqvPnjfVWakLGm015PPSUr2tEPS1dNQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Peter T.]

On Wednesday, May 28, 2025 at 8:28:03 AM UTC+2 KM Lafferty wrote:

[...]

Also to Peter, thank you for reminding me how to convert dates into days in yw-timeline, and for your explication of the issues with regards to timeline programs in this and your other post. 

Does the yw-timeline date/day conversion work for you? Actually, you can use it to switch between specific and unspecific scene dates even without having the Timeline application installed. All you need is a "yw-timeline.ini" file in your project folder with the default date/time set to your "day zero", and days/hours/minutes to date/time conversion enabled. So you can quickly enter your scene dates as days in yWriter, and have yw-timeline' do the job of turning them into specific dates. 

I do think that Simon's judgment of the scene dates in yWriter is a bit low. In fact, the option of entering unspecific dates as days is a very elegant solution to a whole range of calendar-related problems.

 

[Simon Haynes]

On Wed, 28 May 2025 at 16:08, Peter T. <peter.pape...@gmail.com> wrote:

I do think that Simon's judgment of the scene dates in yWriter is a bit low. In fact, the option of entering unspecific dates as days is a very elegant solution to a whole range of calendar-related problems.

 

I'm a bit of a perfectionist - if I had enough spare time there are loads of places where I'd streamline things and improve them, but yWriter is only a hobby, not a money-making exercise.

Also, I naturally work on parts of the program I need the most - like the new direct-to-epub exporter, project and global variables, latex exporting, etc.

(I've just uploaded newly-created ebooks and paperbacks for about 30 titles across 4 different app stores. No dramas so far.)

[Peter T.]

Anyway, yWriter is based on a clever concept and with yw7 has a file format that is well designed for downward compatibility and also opens up well for third-party utilities. 

Perhaps it has recently suffered somewhat technically due to the GUI redesign. Regardless of that: I have seen in various open source projects that especially increased demands on theming reveal stability problems of GUI frameworks.

In any case, a great job alongside writing. Best of luck for the future! 

[Simon Haynes]

Thanks, and yes the listview rework was probably a mistake, but I had to write the new listview for a simracing overlay I was working on 4-5 years ago anyway. I just adapted that one, and it's definitely more flexible than the built-in one.

I have a 1440p monitor now so I'm running into scaling issues - especially as my various screens have different zoom levels, which keeps tripping windows up.

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "yWriter" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ywriter+u...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ywriter/de9d9c0c-22cd-4d19-be64-a602cc8444dfn%40googlegroups.com.

[Slery]

Simon does a great job creating something useful in his spare time that he gives us for free and is by far the most accessible solution for those of us that use screen readers. And, he is prompt to fix things for us when updates break things we use.

Cindy 

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "yWriter" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ywriter+u...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ywriter/de9d9c0c-22cd-4d19-be64-a602cc8444dfn%40googlegroups.com.