At the request of my DM, I just wrote a 6k word backstory for a DnD character. Not worrying about formatting or linking, I flew the writing - all in narrative prose.
Many characters, locations, organizations, concepts, etc (I call these “elements”) are mentioned.
Once done writing I wanted to go back, highlight & “[[” any of these elements, after which I’d have a list of element Backlinks within the story, which I could past the list into it’s own document thus quickly generating an element index or cheat sheet of sorts for the DM.
Here are the things that are keeping that workflow from happening:
- Not being able to see a list of the unique backlinks in the current document. Not this files backlink mentions, but a list of the links that are mentioned in this file. It’d be nice to see the list with a little indicator of how many times this link appears in this document.
[[Link 1]] (3)
[[Link 2]] (2)
[[Link 3]] (1)
[[Link 4]] (8)
[[Link 5]] (1)
-Being able to highlight and copy/paste from the backlinks list.
Pasting simply in another document as:
[[Link 2]]
[[Link 3]]
[[Link 4]]
-An option to generate pages for all the [[links]] in the document which haven’t been made yet. Going through and adding [[ to the elements is enough work, but needing to having to also go through and click each one to make sure it get’s it’s own page is a pain. So either an option to toggle, instant page creation, or to give more manual control, "Create Page for all New Backlinks.
Some of this workflow exists in writing software, especially screenwriting, which generate “reports” which give you a glimpse into the concrete elements in the story at bird’s eye views.
Any thoughts on existing features that could achieve this? It seems like it’s a pretty benign use of backlinks, but if there’s any plugin’s listed that you feel I could upvote that would fit, please feel free to point them out.