The first line of the "info" string will be automatically indented in the "Info" window. To make paragraph breaks, use the entity "¶" immediately before the first word of the new paragraph.
<info>Charles II allied himself with France against the Dutch, but in the @ensuing war@Third Anglo-Dutch War@ the Dutch forced him to make a separate peace. By the Treaty of Dover in 1670, @Louis XIV@@ of France had secretly promised to pay subsidies to Charles, who in turn promised to convert England to Roman Catholicism, but these payments proved insufficient to sustain another war.
[ era ] year number [ era ] [ month name [ date number ] ] [ (uncertainty) ]The square brackets indicate optional parts. The year is the only mandatory element. It may be preceded or followed by either "A.D." or "B.C." to indicate an era other than the default; it is necessary to do this for lives or events which span the boundary between the B.C. and A.D. eras, since the default era cannot be changed in mid-record.
Following the year, the month name or its abbreviation (not number) may appear, if it is known. If the month is given, the date of the month may follow.
Finally, an uncertainty may be given. There is already an implied uncertainty in any date that has only a year, or only year and month. For example, if only 1520 is stated, the actual date Twistory uses to draw the event is 1520 July 1, but the uncertainty will be plus or minus six months. To specify another uncertainty, put a number in round brackets following the date. (No spaces are necessary.) The units are those of the last element of the date. For example, 1889 May(3) means within three months of 1889 May 15.
A.D. dates may also be given in ISO format:
YYYY.MM.DDAny date in a person's record (other than his or her birth date) may alternatively be identified by the age of that person at the time. This is only valid if the date of birth is given first. The age must be a whole number of years, and may have an uncertainty. This is the format:
"age" age in years [ (uncertainty) ]A note on calendars: Twistory uses the Gregorian calendar starting in October of 1582, when the Vatican adopted it, and the Julian calendar before that. It took several hundred years for most of Europe to adopt the Gregorian calendar, so there is considerable confusion surrounding exact dates in the ensuing centuries. Different countries were 10 or more days apart in their reckoning during that time, and little or no care has been taken while assembling the resources for this program as to whether a date quoted was still in the old style (Julian) or already in the new style (Gregorian). Therefore one should be wary when comparing dates during the three or so centuries preceeding the 20th, unless he or she has taken care to convert all old style dates after 1582 into the new style. Furthermore, between 33 B.C. and 8 A.D., a problem with leap years means that the calendar was not even strictly Julian during that time, and before the Julian reform in 45 B.C., things are even more confusing. While few milestones have exact dates recorded for them before 8 A.D., bear in mind that for those which do the calendar shown is not exactly the one in use then.
A more significant error is likely to be in the reckoning of the new year. In many countries and until recent centuries, the new year was deemed to occur on March 25. Hence, dates recorded as being between January 1 and March 24 inclusive stand to be misunderstood, and placed a whole year earlier than they actually happened. Again, little or no account has been made of this ambiguity in compiling the default database for Twistory.
A note on uncertainties: An uncertainty associated with a date can mean several things. First, it can refer to an occurrence whose exact date is lost to history. If an ancient chronicler wrote that an event occured during a given year, but gave no date, we may assume that we will simply never know its exact day. Second, different historians in reconstructing a history with few dates may date an event within some time span according to likelihood or sequence. When I have come across contradictory time spans for an event, I have blended the two together into an inclusive (less certain, but more likely) period. Third, uncertainties may appear because I have simply made a judgment of my own (e.g. made a guess about someone's year of birth based on his children's). In this case, the uncertainty you see does not mean that a date is not known more accurately to historians; it means I haven't found out a more accurate date yet, but I wanted something reasonable to put it. Whatever their origin, there are two ways in which uncertainties may be understood: as rigid bounds within which an event must have occurred due to sequence; or as ranges of likelihood (gaussian, or "bell" curves, if you would) corresponding to some probability mass, say 75%. I have adhered more to the latter when assigning uncertainties. You may make your own decision in how you treat them in resources you compile.
A note on the order of <gen>, <b>, <d>, <fa> and <mo>: If <gen> is used, the generation difference will be reckoned from the birth of the parent who is mentioned before it. If <b> and/or <d> is used, it is best to give the <fa> and <mo> fields after them; this allows Twistory to better discriminate between people with the same name when finding the parent.
Some colours may be specified by name. The following words are recognised as colour constants: beige, black, blue, brown, burnt orange, chartreuse, chestnut, crimson, cyan, dark grey, emerald, forest green, fuchsia, green, grey, indigo, light brown, light grey, lime green, magenta, olive, orange, oxblood, pale cyan, pale green, pale yellow, periwinkle, pink, purple, red, rose, sapphire, sea green, sky blue, turquoise, ultramarine, violet, white and yellow.
The colours are used on the bars that indicate lifespans or extended events in the time-line window. A person is coloured according to his/her nationality, so place descriptions can have colour fields. An event is coloured according to its type, so event types (defined in menu-item records) can have colour fields too.
Custom icons can be used. See these tables of person icons and event icons. The icon is specified by putting its name in the <icon> field of a menu-item record.
It is possible to create additional icons if you are so inclined. You only need a program called "ResEdit," which is available free from Apple, and which is distributed with most development software. (Instructions on its use are not included here.) Make a copy of the Twistory application before modifying its resource fork. Create additional 'cicn' resources and give each one a name.
