Notes are the basic units of writing and information in Tinderbox document. There is no fixed limit to the number of notes a Tinderbox document can handle; it can easily manage thousands, even tens of thousands of notes. At some point performance will become a limiting factor, but use of agents and rules is a bigger factor in this than the sheer number of notes.
Each note has:
- a title: the name of the note. This is stored as the $Name attribute of the note.
- body text: stored as $Text.
- attributes: other pieces of information about the note. For instance the note's colour, size, position in the map, and whether it is exported or not.
The equivalent of many pages of styled text and images can be fitted in a note's $Text, but notes are best kept short. Using less text per note also makes it easy to find exactly the desired content, and helps agents find specifically what they're seeking.
A note is text: it can contain many paragraphs, with colour, bold, italic and underline mark-ups, a choice of font as well as links and embedded graphics. Under the hood, Tinderbox files are XML allowing a good range of options when it comes to exporting text. HTML is especially easy as an output format, but the HTML export method can be used for pretty much any mark-up format (XML, PHP, OPML,etc.) as well as plain text - including web support text formats such as CSS.