## Projects and Documents

One of the biggest problems every writer, no matter what profession he is in, has, is organisation. This is not necessarily limited to his occupation as a writer – ;) – but unfortunately a computer program cannot deal with your laundry and stuff. So let's skip this.

As has been said in the previous chapter, a standard text (e.g. a novel) is not written in a whole or in a single text or document. Therefore it is of utmost importance to keep all those documents collected. The writer usually accomplishes this himself by using the Finder (with Mac OS X) and creating a folder, naming it wisely and putting all text documents there. Some text applications also offer the ability to create "base documents" which then link to several single text parts or single documents.

The difficulty in this method – despite all preliminary attempts of organising things – lies in the lack of overview for the whole project. Add to that the fact that single documents still might come up totally unorganised (everyone knows why the desktop is cluttered with so many "New document.txt" files).

Concept: Ulysses presumes that every user wants to create more than one document. Because of this, a project file is created, which holds all documents. This project file is a single file in the Finder so that copying that file will automatically copy all contained documents. The project file is actually also a special folder (a so called "package"), in which the respective documents are available as single, physically present text files.

Pros: Organisation, clarity, security.

< The Idea behind Ulysses
Two Editing Levels >