I think it should be entirely possible. Different parts of your novel can just be different shapes and you can arrange them on the infinite canvas as you wish.
In addition, Monodraw now supports embedding of pictures on the canvas, so you should be able to have additional visual cues.
Feel free to get in touch if you have any specific use cases in mind - always happy to hear more from our users.
Thanks!
EDIT: Wait! Having actually opened the program. There's layers. It's not a raw ascii save file. Interesting.
EDIT EDIT: Would suggest XML save file so that all data is always in plain text. See, e.g. Eastgate Tinderbox's save file.
I would also love nonrectangular (arbitrarily shaped) text fields. And text flow around shapes if you overlap a shape with a text box.
Basically, the features of Scribus.
BUT, I may be a far edge case, of wanting to do actual writing and desktop publishing in something like this.
In any case, for the features it has, it feels extraordinarily clean, comprehensive, and polished.
And another quick thought. I haven't looked closely at your save format, but it'd be great if one could also have periodic autosave to *.txt or even autosave after every change. Layers, etc., would be lost, but I'd feel safer than leaving data in your "proprietary" format (which actually might be quite accessible) if I investigated it.
That's exactly how it works! Select any number of shapes, hit Cmd-C and it will copy them to the clipboard. You can even set a preference to include a comment tag when copying to the clipboard.
> And another quick thought. I haven't looked closely at your save format, but it'd be great if one could also have periodic autosave to *.txt or even autosave after every change.
As a standard OS X document app, it autosaves are regular intervals that are determined by the OS (in particular, every time you leave the app, as well).
Ah, have to be in select mode. Not intuitive--I really did play around and give up, and I'm not stupid. ;-)