Card

Cards are the containers for most things inside a Hypstory, e.g. text paragraphs, text formatting, and links to other cards. If you imagine your story as a website, cards are its different pages that contain separate chunks of the text.

Accordingly, when you put a link inside a card your readers can click it to navigate to a different card. If you put more than one link, readers can choose which card to go to next. In other words, with cards you can make your Hypstory interactive and nonlinear.

Create a card

Creating a card is easy:

Start your card by writing the :CARD: tag on a new line (as in line 1 above). On the same line after the tag, you write a name for your card. Later, when you create a link to this particular card you will use this name.

All lines that follow the line with the :CARD: tag are the content of that card – until the next :CARD: tag.

Practice tip: Try changing the text on line 2 in the source text above. Then hit update and see what happens.

Card names must be unique throughout your Hypstory. There cannot be two cards with the same name.

Set the start card

When your Hypstory is displayed, one card has to come first. Usually, this will be the topmost card in your source text.

But you can set any card as the starting point of your Hypstory. Simply add the start keyword:

To add the start keyword to a card, put a pipe character (|) after the card's unique name. Then write "start".

If you set start on more than one card in your Hypstory, the last card that has it will be displayed first.

Practice tip: Try deleting the start keyword on line 3. Then hit update and see what happens.

Card shorthands

The :CARD: tag is one way to start a card. Another is to use a hash (#).

Workflow tip: You can write as many hashes as you want. Use them to visually structure your source text.

Workflow tip: As with all Hypstory tags, you can choose between uppercase and lowercase letters. :CARD: and :card: work just the same.