Each note (including agents and adornments) has:
- a title, i.e. the name of the note. This is stored as the $Name attribute of the note.
- body text: stored as $Text. It is not necessary for a note to have any body 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 are seeking.
A note is primarily text: it can contain many paragraphs, with colour, bold, italic and underline mark-ups, a choice of font as well. This content can also contain links to other notes or link out to web URLs. Embedded graphics in the text are also supported.
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 and including web support text formats such as CSS.