Potential Feature: Dialogue Focus

Ashley_Gardiner · July 11, 2020, 5:08am

The last straw which made me move to dabble completely was to find out that *Scrivener had a feature for mac users only that allowed you to focus just on the dialogue, making all the text surrounding your character’s speech fade back allowing editing/review/focus on just the words spoken by and between characters.

I think this is an amazing feature to be added into the future for dabble that would make it even more powerful.

*Another writer software PapyrusAuthor also has a focus on dialogue feature in their paid version.

AJ_Hunter · July 11, 2020, 2:59pm

https://dabble.featureupvote.com/ Sounds like a good idea. You should suggest on over at the feature request. I’m not sure I’ve seen it before, but it could be there so a quick search should be fun.

Ashley_Gardiner · July 12, 2020, 2:14am

and done. thanks for the link, I forgot what the area for upvoting features was called.

Johannes_Rexx · July 12, 2020, 2:25am

That is a hugely helpful enhancement request. Nothing makes a manuscript reek of “amateur” more than unbalanced quotation marks. It makes my skin crawl.

Once you document that potential feature suggestion please come back here and I will up-vote it promptly

Jacob · July 13, 2020, 4:00pm

https://dabble.featureupvote.com/suggestions/107538/dialogue-focus

I voted for it also. I did not know Scrivener had this and have wanted to add “story smarts” to Dabble since the beginning, including a mode where you could see all the dialogue for a single character so you could focus on their voice and really dial it in. This simpler focus feature would be a great first step.

Thanks Ashley!

Dennis_Fleming · July 14, 2020, 2:46pm

That would be a great feature here. My problem with Scrivener is if you need classes on how to use the “user-friendly” software, it isn’t use friendly. What I love about Dabble is it is intuitive and uncluttered.

Tori · July 14, 2020, 10:24pm

I upvoted this. It would be so useful to me.
I agree with you Dennis regarding Scrivener. I tried it for the free trial in Sep 2017 (Just before I found Dabble). I think I turned it on twice and then threw it in the too hard basket - and (for a non-programmer) I’m pretty tech savvy. Part of the ever-growing reason I’m so sold on Dabble is how intuitive it is.

Javier_Plumey · July 16, 2020, 11:54am

That sounds like an incredible feature, and a difficult one to pull off without having to require metadata input by the user. Intriguing!

Jacob · July 16, 2020, 6:03pm

The idea is to eventually add character sheets, then to use some parsing to see where each character is mentioned and who is talking. If there are dialog tags it is easy, and if there are 2 characters in a scene then Dabble assumes it goes back and forth. After that is gets harder, but then again, it is probably harder for the reader to tell who is speaking too.

AJ_Hunter · July 16, 2020, 9:38pm

In more than two person talking though typically should have at least some dialog tags to associate them. otherwise like you said it gets difficult to tell who’s saying what.