Table of Contents
Assigning Cards to an Arc
Whether you call them themes, story arcs, card colours or a variety of other terms, keeping track of what story arcs are evolving in your card set can be a key to good planning of the overall document.
In LostPlot, your can assign each of your index cards to an Arc by first selecting the card and then choosing an Arc colour from the [Cards] > [Arc] toolbar icon.
Initially, Arcs are described only by the colour that will be applied to the card. In order to help remembering which colour is being used for which arc it is also possible to add 'tags' to each Arc - essentially a more understandable suffix which will appear next to the colour in the menu.
In order to add tag to an Arc colour, use the Project Configuration manager to modify the tags and save them into your project.
Using Arc Colours to Plan
The most common use of assigning arc colours to cards is purely a visual one. By assigning an arc colour, it is clear which cards refer to which story arc in the overall card distribution.
By reviewing the distribution of colours, it is possible to see the distribution of the story arcs and how they proceed through the overall plan of the document.
Using Arc Colours to Filter Displayed cards
Once an arc colour has been assigned to a card, it is also possible to manage the cards by that assignment. A common way of using this process is through the filtered display of cards on the Workspace.
In order to filter the display by a specific Arc, select the [Range] toolbar button on the [Cards] toolbar tab. This will display a list of all cards in the current project.
If you chose to display only the first ten or the last ten cards when you loaded the project, only these cards in the list will be selected. While you can choose to manually select cards to display or not display, in larger projects this can become a long-winded process. Instead, you can use the drop-down menu at the bottom of the Range dialog to select groups of cards automatically.
Selecting [All in list] will enable all cards in the project to be displayed, while selecting [Clear Range] will turn all cards off. In order to display only the cards from a specific arc, select the required arc from the list (when tags have been added, they also will show in the drop-down list).
