Documentation? / Sizing

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theasset
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Apr 19, 2023 6:01 pm

Documentation? / Sizing

Post by theasset »

Good afternoon! I came across your tool when I was looking for a way to design layouts for my bullet journal without wasting paper, and I've been playing around trying to understand how the tool works. A couple questions that I thought might have documentation available, but I am unable to find anywhere with guides or how-tos -- I see there's a previous post from 2022 asking for documentation but I cannot locate if anything was ever posted to address this. As such, for now I will post my questions here:

1) How does the sizing work? I originally set a bullet custom Paper size of 420 x 615 pixels, leaving the style as "Dots", and then entered a cell size of 15 with a subdivision of 4. By my math, this should provide a page whereby there are 28x41 dots represented. However, this configuration actually provides 27x40 dots. When I bump up my paper size to 435 x 630, I then get the number of dots required to match my actual page.
What is the actual math used to generate the page and grid? If the edges are counted in the dot generation, it would always add 2 to each, not 1 as it seems happens. Furthermore, when I experiment with changing the "subdivision" value, it doesn't seem to change anything - the page size, the number of dots and the spacing of those dots seems to be the same no matter what # I enter into this field

2) Once I save a page, and then I reopen it, while the dimensions and the number of dots are faithful to my original creation, the Setup tab has reset back to default and doesn't actually communicate the actual page size or grid options therein. Any alterations to those defaults obviously recreate or break the format of the saved page - is there a way to force the setup to communicate what's being shown when re-opening saved pages?

3) Is there any way to enable a ruler of any kind that counts the number of dots or size of the page? Any options to use different colors for every X number of dots to more easily see the "middle" of both the width and height of the pages?

4) How do I choose a name when saving a page? Thankfully when I open a page (where I don't want to save changes to it and use it as a template), then make some changes, testing layouts etc, when I click "Save" it creates a new "untitled" page vs prompting me what I want to name it.
An associated question, how do I save changes to an existing page?
VGP
Posts: 47
Joined: Sun May 22, 2022 8:47 am

Re: Documentation? / Sizing

Post by VGP »

Hello, thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed post!
I've indeed started working on documentation sometime in 2022, but it was neglected because of more pressing technical issues. I plan to get back to it soon!

1) In "dots" mode, dots are drawn at "cell size" steps from the top-left corner, as long as the dot isn't falling on the page borders.
To illustrate this with a simple examples, suppose you set a page size of 100x100 and a cell size of 50. You would see just a single dot.
That's because the app is designed around grids and dots are a different way to render a grid, by only showing the intersection of grid lines.
I hope that's somewhat clear.
Further, in "dots" mode, subdivision doesn't change the rendering of the page, but it does change the grid-snapping interval of your cursor. Maybe that's something for me to reconsider - to make it more similar to the normal grid mode.

2) This is a known bug that I hope to fix soon.

3) That's an interesting suggestion and somewhat ties to the "subdivision" question in (1). I'll think about that.

4) It's currently only possible to name a sketch after saving. If you click the Account button, you should be able to find a Rename button under the relevant sketch.
As for saving changes (and this is an example for something that could really use better documentation), it depends on the "mode" of the application:
- If you work on a "local sketch", it is automatically saved with every change, but it is only saved in your browser on the current device you are using. And it will be erased whenever you start a new sketch. So that's only recommended for something small or temporary.
- If you work on an "online sketch", that is also automatically saved with every change. You can watch the indicator in the top-right corner going between "saving..." and "saved" states as you work.
- If you open a shared sketch, using a link of the form https://virtual-graph-paper.com/somethingsomething, you get a frozen version of the sketch where any change you make will not be saved (unless you save it as a new document)

Thank you for the suggestions and the patience in learning how to use this application.
I'm curious as to what the experience is going like for writing a bullet journal. I think you might find the support for text underwhelming, but I'd be glad to hear about more suggestions to help your workflow.
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