Here:

https://writer-helper-js-vue.firebaseapp.com

Is another writing tool you may try out – it allows you to tag places in your story for hints related to the mood-based action.

What does it mean? For example – let’s say you have a scene in which character “A” tell “B” something that makes “B” react sadly. As we all know, the rule of thumb here is to avoid using adverbs – however, due to my limited vocabulary and experience I often found myself spending a significant amount of time, searching the net, for a nice piece of text, that would describe the required body motion. That often threw me out of the loop – so when I finally described the body motion – I lost track of the rest of the scene. Here is where this tool comes in – it’s purpose is to allow writing story like that:

“I have very bad news,” doctor Stables [breathing;sad], “you may want to sit-“
“No!” [angry] “Please tell me he is fine!”
[headAction;sad] “I’m sorry, he passed this morning…”

And then changing it later to something like that:

“I have very bad news,” doctor Stables heaved a heavy sigh, no matter how many times he did it - bringing bad news was always hard. “You may want to sit-“
“No!” she cried with a shuddering breath. “Please tell me he is fine!”
He bowed his head down. “I’m sorry, he passed away this morning…”

This may not be the best of examples – but you get the idea. Will this be useful to anyone? I have no idea, but it helped me a lot at one point so…

For available hint combinations, see this file (the 'Tags' sheet):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vDL6EcFpAD83Vs8yueOL7t2q4HAgkayrpcz25nRXCjY/edit?usp=sharing

Some screens:

Note: as long as you didn't push space, you should be able to click on other hints, even after selecting something.

Effect:

Note: the tool will of course NOT write your story for you - after inserting a hint, you still need to restructure it to serve your needs (which is evident in the second screenshot), but it will give you some examples, that should at least get you started.

Some technical info:

• Tested mostly in Chrome, but seem to work in FF and Edge too (but not on IE… then again, who cares about that dead zombie). On Android, it seems to work on chrome in desktop mode (but honestly, using it on the phone is a pain anyway)
• Uses browser localStorage to store hints AND story. Every time it rescans for tags the story is being saved in your browser – so when you reload the page, it should be loaded automatically. However, localStorage is limited in size to a few MB and may be disabled in some browsers – in that case, it will fail quietly

• Initial hints are loaded from Firebase, but you can load your own set based on that file:

  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vDL6EcFpAD83Vs8yueOL7t2q4HAgkayrpcz25nRXCjY/edit?usp=sharing

  Just download it as CSV, add what is necessary and use the Load File button on the hint tool. I may switch it to using that GDoc at some point.

  I think that the file itself is pretty self-explanatory: you need to add a text in “ValueShort” column + ActionTag + ExpressionTags (separated by a semicolon) – other columns are optional

  However, if you decide to use this, and add some new hints – please share them, so that others can benefit too 😊

Limitations+Bugs:

• Hint pasting system breaks CTRL+Z functionality – as far as I know, to fix this, I would have to write my own implementation – maybe one day…
• The hint underline can act a little erratic – be placed below or above the tag… and it seems to be browser-dependent. That’s because I use a standard <textarea> with an overlapping div above it, where the text is copied and processed (so that tags, for example, are replaced by spans). It should scroll with the textArea, but sometimes it doesn’t (and some browsers seems to use some offset… argh!). If the tool takes off, I will look into that (the best ‘fix’ would be to dump textArea completely, instead of using an editable div – but this have own quirks), but for now, we will have to live with it
• As mentioned above – localStorage is a must, at least for now

Possible ideas:

• Add possibility to look for word synonyms (using BadDragon’s file as the base, for example)
• Add adverb, and other ‘show don’t tell’ rules scanner
• Add autocomplete for tags

If you have any ideas/bugs/other comments – place them below, feedback is always welcome

6398953 Thank you for posting this. This tool of yours seems really cool. And the fact that you made it available for public is really commendable. Did you write any lengthy text (a story) with tags? Could you, perhaps, post a screenshot of your program after it processes such a text?

I've already stolen the idea for the synonym feature from you and added its uniqueness to my program. Perhaps I may get even more inspiration from the workings of your program. Together, we can learn from one another.

6399004

No problem always wanted to post this, just didn’t have the time… Hell, to be honest, the fact that you published your tool plus the discovery of Firebase, pushed me to finally port it

Did you write any lengthy text (a story) with tags? Could you, perhaps, post a screenshot of your program after it processes such a text?

Yes, (a few chapters of my - still unpublished - story) with the first (.NET based) version (but if everything works fine, then both those tools should produce the same results), but that was a few months ago. As for the screenshot… I have added some to the first post.

I've already stolen the idea for the synonym feature from you and added its uniqueness to my program. Perhaps I may get even more inspiration from the workings of your program. Together, we can learn from one another.

Yes we can - I will probably try to play with the synonyms as well… Perhaps I will be able to add the same mechanism (underline the word with synonyms and show them in the right panel on click), we shall see

6399070 I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but when I click on [breathing;sad], nothing happens. I did load the csv file before I clicked.

6399556

You must first press space, enter or backspace, in oreder for the engine to scan for tags - it scans every time it detects one of those key were pressed but currenlty it doesn't do that automatically after load (will make a note to change that). After that the tags should be marked with a red underline, and you can click on them.

6399582 I managed to make it say 'Sorry no hints available :(' That's something.

Oh, oh! I managed to make it work. My Grammarly addon was apparently interfering with your app.

With a little effort, I could take your programm's uniqness and add it to my own.

6399773

Ah yes, if I recall, I had troubles with the Grammarly plugin as well (and not only in my project, that thing is a mess) - at least for now, it should be turned off for that page.

Good news is that the engine of the writing helper appears to be flexible - I was able to integrate some of your files helpers, and it appears to work:

Blue underlines the synonyms, red the tags. There is still work that needs to be done before it's published, but I think it will work in the end

Unfortunately, this week may be rough when it comes to time, so I can't promise anything, but we shall see...

One more idea I'm thinking about would be to write something that would allow us to scrape the http://www.thesaurus.com/ website or a TemperMonkey plugin that would dump the loaded page content in processed form. That would allow to quickly fill any synonym related resources, automatically.

But again, time, time, time

6400018 Your program is getting mighty powerful. With the new feature, you could also turn it into a regular spellchecker. It's just a matter of picking the right resource file.

6400931

Well, I tried to write the engine to be flexible... But it's nothing without the resources. Yesterda, I looked up the posiblity to get some realtime synonyms from external sitest like the http://www.thesaurus.com/ - but it would seem this is not an easy matter (directly fromt the browser at least) -

I'll see what else I can try... If you have any ideas what kind of functionality could be usefull, feel free to comment

6401030 Perhaps you could ask in the thread if somepony has any resources.

As for new features, you could add some links to existing resources, manual and the like, perhaps.