Journal Text Search, Journal Stuff

I have a growing, extensive journal for my campaign. I'm finding it difficult to find my own information because I can only search by title and tag. Being able to find specific text would be great. And my players can't search the journal at all? why not? That seems odd to me. Also, as far as journaling, when I am editing an handout and surround something in brackets to link to another handout that doesn't yet exist, it renders in brackets when viewed. Perfectly reasonable. But when I create the handout later, and view the older entry with the link in it, it is still in brackets until I edit and save. Be nice if your bracketed "future" links would work once the link was created without having to go back and edit them. Or even better, have everything auto-link or free link to named handouts and characters (like Scabard).

Why put them in brackets before you created the other handout?

Seriously? You've never created a handout or character after it was already mentioned? Or anticipated needing a link to a pending handout?

I keep a GM handout (called GM notes) where I keep links to the important handouts, the players' quest log handout (that they maintain themselves) etc. But I just link them to existing handouts, as OldSchoolChris mentions. Then I edit my GM notes as needed. I guess the auto-linking that you are looking for would require a frequent re-processing of all handouts. I have no idea what impact that has on the performance, but I would probably decide against it if I were a developer of roll20. For the search: For Pro subscribers, there is an API script from The Aaron called " Search ". Very handy to find all kind of information in your handouts. 

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of the Search. As far as links, I agree that if it was a choice between autolinks and performance, I'd go with performance. The issue with retroactive linking I guess is matter of preference, and my preference is not to have a sloppy reference corpus. Situation1: Say, I happen to mention a place--a hamlet called Jerkwater--in the adventure log. Jerkwater doesn't seem very important, the PCs are expected to pass it by. I don't even bold it in the text. But come game time, the players decide they want to stay in Jerkwater awhile, see if anyone there needs rats out of their cellars. I make up a few quests on the fly. They clear the kobolds out the local copper mine, get that up and running. They kill the afanc eating all the trout in Jerkwater Lake. Now they are meeting important town NPCs, like Mayor Hoss Jerkwater, talking about building a stronghold nearby, etc. so I finally create a handout for Jerkwater. Now I have all these references to Jerkwater throughout my campaign journal, and in handouts for NPCs and treasures related to the place... that I have to go back and bracket or I'll go nuts. Situation2 (which is what I'm actually doing): Let's say I'm transferring an existing and reasonably seasoned campaign to handouts from its cross-referenced original home at OP, Scabard, or Campaign Logger. I'm bracketing terms that I know I have entries for, and there are a lot of them. Then I am going back, trying to remember all the references,  and having to edit/save those pages so the links all work.

It seems that many of the issues I was having with back-linking are solved with the Search script! With that I can pull up all references to a thing to get my links in there nice and proper. Thanks again for mentioning it. Good enough for government work, as they say.

Glad to hear that you could use it. But credits go to The Aaron. Pretty much every single script that he wrote is a timesaver. 

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