Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

Might do in the future, but for now, that's what we have.

The research manuscript example is exciting. It would be great if authors could link directly to the part of a paper that they are citing and be able to open that up if you want to dive deeper. Linking methods to results to discussion for specific experiments would make reading through dense papers a lot easier, and maybe have a notation/jargon definition section open at the same time. It's almost like a tiling window manager for reading.

I'm a little bit concerned about how it looks on smaller screens. It looks fine on my work monitor but I only have a netbook at home right now and a lot of websites have overlapping elements that keep me from reading articles. I haven't looked at this from that computer yet though. Maybe it would help to have collapsible columns if there are issues.

Good luck, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes!

However, there are many confusing things to me as a person who arrived at the site through HN. Since one of the developers is promoting the "app" here, it might be useful to hear from him on these points:

1. Is this an input format or is it a publication format, or is it a viewer? Does it rely on a time-tested plaintext markup format like LaTeX or markdown? Perhaps it is a HTML viewer for a LaTeX markup document with special structure, rather than an actual typset web publication format.

2. What is the conceptual structure of the document system? Giving me a screenshot does not show me anything about the way you are conceptualizing your document. Is there a separation of content and output, output and viewer?

3. Is any part of this open source? Are you incorporating any other major technologies which have already been developed?

I apologize if any of the above seems harsh, but this is an important topic and I have become slightly tired of seeing flashy presentations about poorly-thought out "revolutionary" new document formats/tools/whatnot.

What authors usually do is is knock out a freeform treatment where the story is described in prose, which is then broken down into scenes. It is helpful to have the overview in mind during the writing process, but existing tools such as Final Draft provide a plethora of writing aids for that, from virtual index cards to graphical character timelines.

Bear in mind that when you work with finished scripts like the Alien example, you've got a survivor bias problem, because almost any story that makes it through the screen has been through multiple drafts and hundreds or thousands of mini-edits. So while it seems very natural to lay that out in a neat hierarchy, that doesn't really reflect the writing environment, which is a lot more messy.

As for keeping track of story context, this is job one for the writer - you can beef up the dialog or whatever later, but writers, directors and other keys need to be able to keep the entire story in their head at once and know what the inputs and and outputs of any given scene are, not least because 99.9% of films are shot out of chronological sequence and so being able to keep a handle on that story context is essential for guiding the actors. Obviously you don't try to remember every last little thing at once, that's why we use storyboards and breakdown sheets, but you do need to be able to articulate the whole story off the cuff at the drop of a hat.

I do think this would very useful for film students doing analysis, but I can't really see myself writing a script in it, although I'll try doing some treatments with it.

BTW I also feel that if you offer people the opportunity to try it, you should let them try it, not switch to asking for a signup. That really annoyed me.