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Plotline

Plotline is an application to assist in the creation of a novel. While this does not fully replace the old-school P&P (pencil & paper) method, it is nice to have everything in one place. Some of the [planned] features include:

  • Planning the novel plot arc, form inciting incident to the climax.
  • Adding characters, with prompts for character biographies.
  • Creating plotlines for the novel, and assigning characters as part of the plotlines.
  • Adding scenes to the novel to plan out exactly how the novel will work out.
  • Best feature: a full-fleged editor, with markdown syntax highlighting support and a distraction-free mode.
  • Better feature: binding the novel content into a various format, ebook or otherwise.

Current State

The back-end works fine and passes all tests. If someone wants to go for more test coverage I wouldn't complain.

After a revamp to refactor the code into the seperate tab frames I've been reconnecting the signals. The basic theory looks like this:

                    [Main App, *novel]
                        |
     +---------+--------+-----------+-----------+
     |         |        |           |           |
    Novel    Character  Plotline   Scene     Chapter
    Frame    Frame      Frame      frame     frame
    [*novel]  [*novel]   [*novel]   [*novel]  [*novel]

Each frame will contain a pointer to the currently-opened novel stored in the pointer novel. Each frame corresponds to the named backend class, so NovelFrame is the view for the Novel class, CharacterFrame is the view for the Character class and so-on.

Each frame is a subclass PlotlineAppFrame, which inherits the signal novelModified() (which will notify the MainWindow when a change occurs) and the slots noNovelLoad() (which will update the frame fields when a new novel is loaded) and onNovelNew() (which will clear the frame's fields).

Getting a Development Environment Set Up

Getting Qt

Plotline was developed in Qt, a C++ applicaiton framework. If you're new to Qt, now is the best time to learn!

Side note: if you're new to Qt, Qt doesn't use a conventional build system like CMake or Make. Instead, it uses QMake, which generates the Make files and meta objects. So if you try to load the project in KDevelop or Eclipse or try to compile on the command line it might get kind of frustrating. QtCreator was used to develop this application, and that's what I would recommend.

Okay, back to set-up.

First thing's first, you'll need to install Qt5. Either install it with your distribution's package manager (in the case of Linux) or download from Qt.io and install that way.

Getting the source.

Installing Qt should have also installed QtCreator. Open QtCreator and go to File > New File or Project > Import Project > Git Clone. In Repository enter https://github.com/freckles-the-pirate/plotline.git. Check Recursive --this will import submodules. If the current version doesn't have submodules, most likely others will.

Command line

Alternatively, if you're a command-line mastro, you can git clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/freckles-the-pirate/plotline.git
$ cd plotline
$ git submodule init
$ git submdoule sync

And then open the project with File > Open File or Project, and open the Project (.pro) file.

Important!!! Set the Library path

One more thing needs to be attended to. The core application code (in lib ) is a static library in order to allow linking with either the test subproject or the app subproject.

To add this path to the library, go to the Projects tab along the lefthand side of QtDesigner. Up at the top click on the Run tab. Expand the Environment section and modify the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable to append the path ../lib/. For example, if the original value was

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/

Modify the value to look like this:

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/:../lib/

Remember, : means "append" in BASH. ;-)

Do the same for the other subprojects by selecting the run button (that looks like this: Qt Run Button )