Changelog

0.9.4 — 11 September 2026

Read your ebook as an ebook. The ebook formatter has a Read button, and it opens the book a page at a time the way a device will show it. The contents down the side are the ones a reader's Kindle or Kobo will list, every chapter opens its own page as it will in the finished file, and you can change the reader's text size and the width of the screen to see how the book holds up at either. Arrow keys turn pages. It starts on the title page, as most devices do.

What it cannot tell you is exactly what a Kindle will do with your styling — every device overrides some of it and lets the reader change the rest — so it says so, and points you at Kindle Previewer for the pages that have to be right.

Numbered lists are numbered. Every item of every numbered list used to read "1." in the ebook, and a numbered list sent out as a Word file lost its numbers altogether. Both are fixed. A list also holds together on the printed page now, rather than sitting with as much space between its items as between two paragraphs, so three steps read as one list instead of three short paragraphs that happen to begin with numbers. Verse is set the same way: the lines of a stanza sit as lines.

Fixed. Turning verse on and then wanting to stop was a trap. Pressing Enter twice was meant to leave the block and never did, and the only other way out needed the mouse and something selected. It works now, and it no longer turns the stanza you have just written back into prose on the way out.

0.9.3 — 5 September 2026

A chapter can now set some things for itself. Pick a chapter in the print formatter and a second group of settings appears below the book's own: its opener artwork, the picture on the page facing it, the flourish under its title, the mark between its scenes, and its initial. Everything else follows the book, and every control says what it is following, so you can always see what you are changing and what you are leaving alone. Chapters that differ are marked in the chapter list.

Chapter opener frames are drawn rather than uploaded. Ten to choose from, in two groups. Around the page: a single rule, a double rule, a dotted rule, or corners alone in three styles. Around the heading: a box sized to the words in it, rules above and below, a dotted box, or corners. Narraloom holds them inside the printer's safe area and breaks them where a page number crosses, so a frame cannot be the reason a book is rejected.

The picture is shown instead of its filename wherever artwork is chosen, and the facing-page picture now says what size it prints at and whether it is sharp enough, as chapter artwork already did.

0.9.2 — 4 September 2026

Narraloom now sets your book itself. Until now it handed the finished manuscript to another program to lay out the pages. That program is gone, and the typesetting is Narraloom's own. The installer is 55 MB smaller and a whole-book preview is about twice as fast.

See the book as a book. A new Spreads view shows two pages side by side, the way they will be read: the inner margins meeting at the spine, page numbers alternating sides, chapters opening on the right. It draws the printer's lines over the pages too, so you can see where the paper is cut and which margin nothing may cross.

A picture on the page facing each chapter. Chapters open on a right-hand page, so the leaf before one is often blank already. You can fill it with an illustration, either only where a blank already falls or on every chapter. It can run to the edges of the paper or sit inside the margins.

Text can run around a picture. A small illustration no longer takes the full width of the page.

Chapter opener, scene break and part ornaments can now be sized independently. The space around a scene break is yours to set as well.

Long chapter and part titles wrap onto as many lines as they need instead of running off the page.

Pictures are converted when you bring them in, so more formats work and a photograph saved as a PNG no longer makes the PDF several times larger than it needs to be.

Margins grow when they have to, to keep your page numbers and running heads inside the printer's safe area, and Narraloom tells you when it has done so.

0.8.2 — 29 August 2026

Letters, diary entries and epigraphs now set properly. A quoted passage holds all of its paragraphs as one thing on the page, spaced tightly inside and set apart from the prose around it. Before, each paragraph was its own quotation with a full gap between them, so a letter of any length read as several unrelated fragments and nothing showed where it began or ended.

Quoted passages are no longer forced into italic. They are set in the same face as the rest of your book, which is what you have been seeing in the editor all along — the italic was added silently on the way to the finished book. If you want a passage italic, select it and make it italic, the way you would anywhere else. This changes how existing quoted passages look, so it is worth compiling a chapter that has one and taking a look.

Centre a line, or range it right. Two new buttons beside Quote. A letter's signature goes on the right where it belongs, and an inscription or an epigraph attribution can sit in the middle of the measure. It works on a paragraph inside a quoted passage as well as on ordinary prose.

Fixed. Links vanished. You could make one, see it in the editor, save, reload and search for it — and it was simply absent from the ebook, the Word file and the printed page, with nothing to say it had gone. Links now survive into all four. In a paperback the words are printed and the address is a real link in the PDF, so nothing appears on paper that a reader cannot use.

Fixed. Importing a Word document with a table in it kept every word and quietly threw away the rows and columns. It still cannot rebuild the table, but it now tells you so rather than letting you find out later.

Fixed. A blank page in your back matter was listed on the contents page, with a page number printed on it, and the words BLANK PAGE set across the middle. It is now blank, unnumbered and unlisted, which is the entire point of it.

Fixed. A chapter opener with a full-page illustration had a white patch punched through the artwork behind the page number. Openers like that are now left unnumbered, as an illustrated plate is in any printed book. The page still counts, so nothing else in the book is renumbered.

Fixed. Two parts sharing a title gave two identical rows in the search results, both marked the same. They are told apart now.

0.8.1 — 27 August 2026

Search now runs when you ask it to. Press Enter, or the button beside the box. It used to search on every letter you typed, which meant a wait after each one on a full-length book — and a results list that shifted underneath you while you were reading it. This matters most just before you replace something: the count you check is now the answer to a question you asked, rather than a number that happened to settle.

Long result lists are readable again. A search for a common word used to list every match in every scene, hundreds of lines of it. You now get three from each scene, with a link to see the rest of that scene's matches when you want them. Opening the replace box on a large search was taking a second or two; it is immediate.

Matches in a scene's title or synopsis say how many there are, and that Replace all will change them. They were counted in each scene's total but never listed, so the numbers did not add up, and it looked as though they were being shown to you but could not be acted on. They always could.

Fixed. Having a character or place open in the right-hand panel made writing stutter. Narraloom was re-reading the whole manuscript to work out which scenes mentioned them, every time anything on that panel changed. It now looks only where it needs to.

0.8.0 — 26 August 2026

Artwork on your chapter openers. Put an illustration across the head of every chapter, or behind the title, or over the whole page bleeding off all four edges. Narraloom tells you the exact pixel size the artwork needs for a sharp print at your trim size, and marks it green, amber or red as you choose a file — so you find out before you upload, not after. There are drawn frames too: rules above the title, a border around the opener, or corner pieces of your own. They can be used together.

A contents page. Off unless you want one. It lists parts and chapters with the page each begins on, sets itself last in the front matter, and lists your back matter but not your front. Entries read Chapter One · The Beginning by default; you can show the number alone or the title alone instead.

Find anything in the manuscript by name. A filter above the book's outline in the sidebar narrows it to whatever you type, matching scenes, chapters, parts and matter pages. Beside it, a Jump button opens the whole book as one list and takes you anywhere in it — including your afterword, which used to sit below every scene you had written.

See how much you have written, day by day. A progress panel next to the sprint button, showing the last thirty days or the last twelve months, how many days you actually wrote, and your average on the days you did. A day where you cut more than you added shows below the line, so a revision pass looks like what it is.

Search now covers chapter and part titles. It did not, and that mattered more than it sounds: those titles are printed on the page, so renaming a character across the book left every chapter heading naming the old one, and search reported nothing left to change. Replacing and undoing both cover them now.

Filter the corkboard. The outline could already narrow itself by point of view, status or your own fields. The corkboard now does the same, hiding chapters with nothing left in them, and cards can still be dragged while a filter is on.

Fixed. When something went wrong badly enough to stop Narraloom drawing its window, you got a blank screen and nothing to report. You now get a page that tells you what happened, offers to save a copy of your work before you reload, and copies the details to your clipboard in one click. Details are also written to a log file — never any of your writing, which is checked rather than trusted.