I need to reconsider the way that outer appositives are delimited. The current system is a bit of a mess. Inner appositives have a clean grammar with braces and pipes; shouldn't outer appositives follow a similar grammar? The current structure, with percent signs and carriage returns, is silly; it relies on invisible characters and can readily confuse an inadvertent carriage return with an outer appositive.
So, if I were to use something like the brace-and-pipe system, what would it be? Square brackets are an obvious candidate; but what is the internal delimiter?
This is trickier than I thought &emdash; the notion of using a new line is good. After all, if we just pile these things in sequence, the storybuilder will see an undifferentiated pile, and not be able to recognize the sentence breaks. That carriage return is a good thing, but then it needs a prefix symbol (such as a % sign) to differentiate a simple line wrap from an outer appositive. Hmm.
Let's change the subject for a moment. Shouldn't I have my own special delimiter for POVs, some special character that isn't accesible to the storybuilder? There are plenty of such characters in the ASCII set, reliance on one would make it impossible for the storybuilder to screw up my POV delimitations. Yes, I suppose I'll do that. What are the characters to use? I think that ASCII 30 (Record Separator) is the ideal character to use here. It makes some sense, it's already defined in other ways, and it will produce an undefined character if it stumbles onto the screen. OK, that's one decision.
Back to the earlier problem. Rats &emdash; procrastination didn't solve it. I'm going to stick with the carriage return - percent sign combination. Let's see if I can't get the spell checker to handle it.