Text Folding Tool for Referee Notes

Organizing campaign notes is frustrating. My preference would be to keep all my hobby material in an analog format, but it’s not practical. A campaign is a constantly evolving mesh of interconnected ideas. A referee can never know which parts of their notes will need to be removed, or expanded wildly beyond their original scope. I’ve tried a bunch of methods: binders, notebooks, recipe boxes full of index cards, stacks of paper with bespoke organizational symbols in the upper corner. In the end, all of them required too much paper shuffling in order to find anything. Digital tools are too useful not to take advantage of here.

But my experience with digital tools has been fraught. In part that’s due to my own general Ludditism: I don’t own a smartphone, and I refuse to even consider relying on web based tools. “Sorry guys, we can’t play today, the website is down.” is an absolutely unacceptable possibility for me. Then there’s all the effort that will be involved to extract my game’s data when the web tool inevitably goes belly up, or gets bought out by some VC firm who makes it unusable. I have a strong preference for software that can be run locally, with a minimum of bloat.

I’ll say it again: organizing campaign notes is frustrating. But I did recently find an option that I’m reasonably happy with, and would like to share.

(Sorry I couldn’t unfold any of the interesting text. My players might be spying on this blog even as we speak >.>)

Libre Office is an open source suite of office software. It replaced the old OpenOffice project, and is currently the primary Free Software alternative to Microsoft Office. It’s a nice piece of software that I recommend in general, but is specifically useful for this hidden feature demonstrated in the video. The ability to to treat header text as a folder for all the body text written beneath, which can then be revealed or hidden with a click of the mouse.

To enable this feature you’ll need a reasonably recent version of LibreOffice. Navigate to Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Advanced. On that tab, under “Optional Features,” check the box next to “Enable experimental features.” This will require restarting the application. Now you can navigate to Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOfficeWriter ▸ View, and check the box next to “Show outline-folding buttons.” Optionally, I also recommend navigating to View ▸ Web for the best effect. Page breaks are an unnecessary complication when your text is going to be expanding and contracting.

Once that’s done you’re good to go. To set text as a foldable heading, use the dropdown menu in the upper left to make it a heading. A little button should appear beside the text (you may need to hover to see it). If you click this, all the text beneath the heading (down to the next heading) will disappear. Clicking it again will cause the text to reappear. Fill the spaces beneath headings with all the tables, keys, and background information you like! I should point out that I’ve had the best luck using “Default Paragraph Text” here. For whatever reason, selecting “Body Text” has sometimes caused the folding function to stop working properly. I’m not sure why, except that this is an experimental feature and not yet fully developed.

There’s a lot I love about this method. It keeps my notes tidy, no matter how voluminous they get. It’s easy to use at the table since all the headings fit on about two digital pages. The fact that it’s built into a word processor means there’s a minimum of barrier between USING the tool (folding and unfolding it) and MAKING the tool (adding new text, removing old text.) No need to interrupt my writing process to reference special syntax any time I want to add a new header.

No solution is perfect, of course. The way you need to carefully select the way your body text is tagged is irritatingly fiddly. The feature also doesn’t seem to be well optimized. Scrolling through a large document causes the application to chug, and there’s often quite a bit of lag when folding and unfolding text. (Both issues visible in the video above). Some of that’s just down to word processors being kinda bloated pieces of software, which is why I usually write in text editors. None the less, I haven’t found any quicker or easier alternatives yet.

I should note that Microsoft Office does have a similar tool, which presumably works just as well (or better) than LibreOffice’s unfinished feature. My friend Chris H. also swears by a piece of software called Scrivener. From the looks of it, I think Scrivener would be an ideal solution to my campaign note organization needs. I’d happily pay their $50 fee to use the software. Sadly they have no linux compatible version, so I must do without. Thus I can only pass on a second-hand recommendation from Chris H.

BTW, while I’ve got you here: my friend Ava is a SuperCoolLady™ and needs some help funding her transition. If you’ve got a few dollars to spare, that’d be a very SuperCoolLady™ thing for you to spend them on.

Additional Reading

A New Writer Outline Folding Mode on the LibreOffice Dev Blog
Resources For Playing Online on The Retired Adventurer
Hexcrawl Dashboards on Rise Up Comus
Hexcrawls and Computers on Save Vs. Total Party Kill
DM Screen V1 on I Cast Light!