Tony's Diary Search — manual & release notes

1. Searching

One box, five releases, 2,839 entries. The query language is small and exact.

Case is ignored unless Aa case sensitive is ticked. Every hit is highlighted; HIT Prev/Next steps through matches inside an entry and moves the PDF to each hit.

2. Boxes: diary, email, attachment, meta

Every result is one box. The box type decides the badge and where it sits.

An email box holds only what its author wrote — no quoted history. The messages it answers are separate boxes, reached through reply links, or walked as a whole conversation in the Thread tab. Attachments announced in the text show as chips: an active link when the document is in the releases, a dimmed tag otherwise. URLs inside a box's text are clickable.

Every box scrolls on its own; Full text removes the height cap. Email stamps are normalised to New York time, local time alongside, and the header (From/To/Subject/Sent) sits in a tight blue block above a rule, separate from the body. A long email body with no natural paragraph breaks is split one sentence per line for readability — the underlying text and search are unaffected.

Meta and attachment boxes (the publisher's own cover analysis, and documents like the historical record) default to unticked in Box types, so the main list and search stay to the dated record — they always have a permanent home in the Linked Docs tab instead, reachable from any box that references one. Telling the two apart matters: a meta box is commentary about the release (so it belongs with the publisher's other front matter), while an attachment is itself part of the historical record being released, just one that travelled as a separate file rather than a dated entry.

3. The timeline

The timeline plots entries against search hits, one bar per day. Clicking a bar opens that day's entry and its PDF page. The legend below the chart has one group per box kind (colour-coded, no shading); tick the group's own checkbox to show/hide that whole kind, or tick one of its release sub-checkboxes to show/hide just that release. Box types does the same thing for the kinds, as a compact dropdown.

Drag across the chart to draw a box and zoom straight to that stretch — the entries axis rescales so the tallest bar in view reaches close to the top, instead of staying sized for the single busiest day in the whole 22-year span. Scroll to zoom at the cursor, double-click or the ↺ button to reset. The timeline panel itself can be resized by dragging the handle below it (Landscape: width; Portrait: height), and Landscape/Portrait redraw the chart to fit either way.

4. Main Docs / Linked Docs / Thread tabs

The reading panel on the right always shows one of these three. The result list on the left sits in its own panel too, under a single tab labelled Content.

A box with a reply/forward link shows a 🧵 Thread button; clicking it opens that conversation. Clicking another message's card in the Thread tab re-centres the conversation on it. Each message also carries two jump links: Open in Main Docs jumps straight to that message's scanned page without losing your place in the thread, and Open in Content instead recentres the left-hand Content list on that exact message — including a note or attachment that Box types currently has hidden, which is shown anyway since it was asked for by name.

5. The PDF viewer

Clicking a result switches to that entry's release PDF automatically and jumps to the page where its content starts; HIT Prev/Next follows each hit across pages.

6. Bookmarks

The rail on the left keeps your own pointers into the record. Click the toggle on any box to keep it; click again to drop it. Save writes a JSON file you can keep or load into another DRASTIC app.

7. Keyboard

8. The five releases

9. Release notes

"Meta" kind introduced; a prequel cover email corrected

• New kind: meta (renamed from "note"): analysis or organisational material produced about a release — a publisher's prequel-style preface, a conclusion, a summary, an index — as opposed to an attachment, which is itself part of the original historical record. Behaves exactly as "note" did (unticked by default in Box types, permanent home in Linked Docs); only the label and the boundary it draws changed.
• Correction: the Prequel's self-addressed "cover email" of 11 July 2015 (Subject: "history", carrying the historical record as its attachment) was previously classified as an email box. It is not genuine correspondence — it is the publisher's own device for attaching the historical record — so it is now classified meta like the Prequel's own release note. Its attachment (the historical record itself) was already correctly classified and is unchanged.

Missing Years + bookmarks + manual

• Missing Years release: 694 diary entries Jul 2015 – Dec 2019 plus the publisher's cover analysis as a release note; every entry page-mapped with content-equality asserted.
• Bookmarks rail: collapsible sidebar with scroll arrows, a toggle on every box, and Save/Load to a JSON file that travels between the DRASTIC apps.
• On-demand PDF rendering: clicking a result always lands on the correct release.

Missing Pages

• Missing Pages release: 125 diary entries Dec 2021 – May 2022 plus the publisher's cover analysis as a release note, filling the gap inside the Main Diary's own date range; every entry page-mapped with content-equality asserted.

Thread tab, Linked Docs tab, timeline rework, readability

• 🧵 Thread tab: a Gmail-style view of an email's full reply/forward chain, upstream and downstream; an Open in Main Docs button on every message jumps to its scanned page without losing the thread's own focus.
• Linked Docs tab: release notes and attachments moved out of the main scrollable list into a dedicated tab, each with full text and its own Open in Main Docs link — they default to unticked in Box types so search and browsing stay to the dated record.
• Timeline legend rebuilt: one coloured group per box kind (no per-release shading) with a row of release sub-checkboxes nested under it, replacing the flat per-release swatch list.
• Drag-to-zoom: draw a box on the chart to zoom straight to it; the entries axis rescales to whatever stretch is actually in view, with a real labelled scale, instead of staying sized for the single busiest day across the whole 22 years.
• Resizable timeline panel, brighter grid lines, and a day with zero entries no longer draws a stub bar.
• Reading panel tabs renamed: the PDF-viewer tab is Main Docs (it used to be called "Content", then briefly shared the name "Timeline" with the chart); the front-matter tab is Linked Docs (previously "Reference Sources", "Complementary" before that).
• Result list becomes a panel of its own: the left-hand search/browse list now sits under a single tab labelled Content. An Open in Content button on every Linked Docs item and Thread message recentres that list on the referenced entry, even one Box types currently has hidden — distinct from Open in Main Docs, which opens the scanned page on the right instead.
• Readability: email headers sit in a tight blue block above a rule; a long body with no natural paragraph break is split one sentence per line.

10. Known limits

• Inline pasted emails inside diary prose stay inside the diary box by design.
• Redacted pages carry only the release footer; Mar 9–10 2016 have no diary text here.
• Year typos corrected from sequence + content carry a note on the card — never silent.