There are several ways to organize your maps, both inside and outside of CC3+. We’ve previously talked about linking your maps together to make a navigable atlas, and how to index your maps to make them easy to search to find the map you want. Today, I’ll talk about the bookmark feature in CC3+. Using bookmarks, you can create lists of maps, for examples maps belonging together, or maps with a common theme. For example, in the community atlas, I have bookmarks for the different types of maps, for example one bookmark set that contains all the overland maps, one the contains all the dungeon maps, and so on.

Managing the Bookmarks

You can find the bookmark dialog by clicking the View Bookmarks button in the file toolbar. From here you can navigate to the maps in the currently loaded bookmark file, you can create add entries to the current file, start a new file or save the current one to a file on disk to load later. Note that this dialog is also used to show search results, so if you search for maps, you can actually save the result of a search to a file for accessing it later.

When using this dialog, I recommend you turn off the option to show file paths, map names often disappear outside the box if you show the file paths. Personally, I treat this more as a debug tool if a map fails to load, as then perhaps the path stored int he bookmark file may be in error.

Managing the Bookmark Files

Managing the files is done with the buttons to the far right in the dialog, and should be straightforward. New starts a new blank file, Open lets you pick a file on disk, Save writes the changes back to disk, and Save As lets you save the changes to a new file instead of overwriting the current one. Restore resets the entries in the dialog back to the state of the file on disk, useful to undo changes (unless you have actually saved and thus overwritten the file on disk).

Managing Entries

Managing the entries should be similarly straight forward. Add Current will add the current open map to the list, while Add Select will bring up a file picker dialog you can pick a map file to add. If you wish to add multiple files at once, you can use Add Search, which brings up the search dialog. I talked about searching in the Indexing Maps article, and it can be used to search both an index, or just a folder of maps. After running the search, you get to pick which maps to add to the bookmark, you can pick multiple maps from this list by holding down control or shift when clicking on the names.

Move Up/Down is just use for rearranging the order, and Delete removes the map from the bookmark list (but does not delete the map itself).

Navigating the Bookmarks

One way of navigating the bookmarks is just to access the dialog as described above, pick a map, and hit the Open Selected Entry button. But you can also use the Previous Bookmark and Next Bookmark buttons on the toolbar to navigate between maps.

Maps Fail to Open

You may experience that when you try to open a map from a bookmark file, it displays as all black. What this means is that the file failed to open, so CC3+ just created a new blank file for you. So, what can cause files to fail to open? Well, usually it is just a result of the file not being found where the bookmark says it is. The bookmark contains the full path of the map, and if the map was moved to another location on your computer (or perhaps the bookmarks was created on a different computer with different paths) CC3+ simply cannot find the map at the specified location. In these cases you need to update the bookmark file and replace the entry with a new one with the correct path.

Enabling the show file paths option in the dialog allows you to see where CC3+ is trying to find the map, and lets you determine if this is a bad path or not.

Relative file paths

When CC3+ creates entries in the bookmark file, it will always use absolute file paths. For bookmark files, this is usually the best idea, because CC3+ parses relative file paths relative to the currently open map, and not the bookmark file itself. Thus, bookmark files with relative paths in them only work if you already have a map open in the appropriate location. (Of course, this applies to map-relative [$] paths, data directory relative paths [@] work just fine)

Bookmark Files are Text Files

CC3+ saves bookmark files with the .bkm extension, but these are plain text files that can be opened in notepad or a similar text editor and edited manually. This is a great way to edit a bookmark file to update the paths in them, you can for example use the search and replace feature of the text editor to do mass edits if you have moved the maps. This is also the way if you want to put relative paths into your bookmarks.

Community Atlas Bookmark Files

As mentioned earlier, the community atlas contains a set of bookmark files for the different categories, such as overland or dungeon.

However, because the community atlas is designed to be able to be put anywhere on your computer, these files use relative paths. So to use them correctly, start by opening any atlas map in your local community atlas installation (Note that you must have unzipped the atlas to a folder, opening the files directly from the zip file won’t work for this purpose). Then, open the bookmark dialog, hit the Open button, and navigate to the bookmarks subfolder under your atlas installation, and open the bookmark file of your choice. You can now use the bookmarks as normal.

If you fail to open an atlas map first, you’ll just notice that all maps fail to open as described above.

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