You could also use comments to start a new sheet with a short synopsis of your text. In his book “Writing a Novel With Ulysses”, David Hewson proposes to do this for every single scene of a novel. The first lines of this synopsis will appear as a preview in the sheet table. For a novel, this allows for a handy overview of all scenes.
Unlike annotations and comments, notes relate to a sheet as a whole.
On Mac, open the dashboard via the toolbar’s gauge icon, and switch to the annotations view. In the Notes section, click “Add…”. You can then fill out the newly created note. A sheet can have as many notes as you want.
On iPhone, open the dashboard via the paperclip icon at the bottom of the editor. In the Attachments section, tap “Attach a note…”. Once your sheet contains an image or note attachment, a paperclip icon will be displayed next to the dashboard icon. Tapping this icon will bring the attachments up.
On iPad, open the dashboard via the gauge icon in the toolbar, tap the paperclip icon, select “Add…”, and then “Note…”
To remove a note, right-click it and select "Remove Note" from the context menu. When working on iOS, touch and hold the note and select Remove.
You can edit and add notes via the dashboard – but you know that already. However, the dashboard also allows you to get an overview, and quickly edit, your comments and annotations.
On Mac, click the gauge icon in the toolbar, and select the annotations icon to view them.
On iPhone, tap the outline icon next to the dashboard at the bottom of the editor. The comments and annotations will be listed in the Annotations section.
On iPad, tap the gauge icon to open the dashboard, then tap the outline icon.
Comments, annotations, and notes are great for taking down anything you want to remember which doesn’t directly belong to the text itself. When you export your sheets using Ulysses’ built-in export styles, annotations will always be included. However, of the built-in export styles, only Revision will include your comments. Notes are always excluded.
To exclude comments and annotations from the export, you can customize their visibility. Please check the Ulysses Style Sheet Reference tutorial for more information.
If you want, you can explicitly filter your sheets for text contained in comments and annotations. As an example: You could add an inline comment “Reformulate” to awkward prose, and then build a filter to see all sheets containing passages with a need for editing.
