# Attributes

In addition to its title and text, each note has a long list of attributes that describe aspects of the note: its name, color, position, shape, and size. You can define your own attributes as well. Attributes let you put meaningful information in a known place.

For an informal note, you might simply write information in the note’s text:

> Read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

In other contexts — research notes for a dissertation, say — you

might prefer to be a bit more formal:

> Author: Edward Gibbon

> Title: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Author and Title are examples of attributes; by putting the name of the author in a specific place, it is easy for us to distinguish a book by Gibbon from a book that is about baboons and gibbons.

Each attribute has a value; values can be numbers, character strings, boolean (true/false) values, dates, colors, files, and so forth. Whenever you rename, edit, or change a note, you are actually changing the value of one or more attributes of that note.

There are two types of attributes:

- System attributes: information built into all Storyspace documents such as the color of the note, or its width and height. Storyspace keeps this information about every note, and you may view, use, and change it.
- User attributes: you may add your own attributes that every note will have. For instance, you could add the attribute "Priority," and assign every note a priority level from one to five. Or in a bibliography, create the attribute "Type" and tag the note for each source as either "primary" or "secondary."

A few System attributes are

- Read-only attributes: information such as the date and time the note was created, or the date and time it was last modified. Other read-only attributes, such as TextLength and ChildCount, describe properties derived from the document’s current state and are inherently read-only. Storyspace keeps this information about every note, and you may view and use it, but you cannot change it.

Tip: attribute names are case sensitive—"Height" is not the same as "height."

You can inspect and change the value of any attribute in a note's Get Info... window (choose Get Info from the Note menu). Inherited values are in normal weight black text; values set specifically for this note are in bold blak text, and read-only values are in normal weight light gray text.